The Good Mayor (19 page)

“I wouldn’t dare!”

“Yes, you did! That note you sent with the lottery tickets, it said, ‘Dear Agathe.’ I noticed. It’s the first time you’ve ever called me anything but ‘Mrs. Stopak.’”

Tibo cleared his throat and nodded. “Yes,” he said, slowly, “and, would you believe I managed the whole thing in slightly less than a pad and a half of notepaper? Whole forests were cleared so I could write a dozen words inviting you out to lunch.”

They were quiet for a moment, looking at one another across the table and then a door swung open at the back of the cafe and Mamma Cesare came out, carrying an armful of steaming plates. As she negotiated the tables, Tibo and Agathe unwrapped themselves from one another, uncoiling their fingers, drawing apart with a last, magnetic tug until, when Mamma Cesare arrived, they were sitting there, prim and respectable and decent and linked by nothing but their eyes.

“Spaghetti,” Mamma Cesare announced obviously. “You come tomorrow, you get gnocchi.”

“Today, I’m glad we’re getting spaghetti,” said Mayor Krovic but he never looked away from Agathe’s face.

“Very nice.” Mamma Cesare smiled. She put down a basket of crusty bread and pointed out, “Bread, good bread,” and offered wine and water, salads, oil and vinegar and performed all the necessary sacramental rituals of the Italian cafe, dusting their plates with curls of Parmesan and wielding her pepper shaker like an unfeasibly phallic truncheon.

When she left again, Tibo said, “Tell me more about you.”

“I told you too much about me yesterday. Tell me about you.”

Tibo struggled with a mouthful of spaghetti for a moment until, when he felt it was possible to speak with some dignity, he said, “Nothing to tell. You know everything. The whole town knows everything. That is my great tragedy—to have nothing that is not known.”

“I hardly know a thing about you,” said Agathe.

“I find that hard to believe. From what I gather, there’s nothing much happens in Dot that you don’t know all about.”

“Silly stuff. Trivial stuff. Nit powder and hypnotism. All nonsense. I know you are a good man, Tibo Krovic, and kind and handsome …”

“Handsome!”

“Yes. In your way, very handsome. Quiet and honest and trustworthy and calm and kind but I don’t know the first thing about you.”

Tibo looked at her across the bread basket, a forkful of spaghetti held halfway between her plate and her mouth and he saw things in Agathe that he had never, never seen in any woman before. There had been a time (was it ten years ago, twenty years ago, was it longer?) when days like this should have been a commonplace, when Tibo Krovic, a rising young man of Dot, should have been seen in the cafes of the town, in The Golden Angel or even The Green Monkey, laughing too loudly, drinking a little too much, surrounded by friends, holding hands with some lovely young girl in a shadowed alcove, pretending not to notice as she
imagined curtains and wedding dresses, making plans to send her flowers in the morning, making plans to see her sister next week. He should have done that then. There should have been decades of young women, dozens of them, one after another, succeeding each other annually on his arm at the Christmas Charity Ball, a string of willing victims, tangled in his sheets or even, imagine it, one who came and stayed and never staled. Just one. The one. The one who thickened at wrist and waist and ankle, swelled at the hip, moulded the mattress into familiar curves and hollows and plumped and blossomed and fruited, again and again, a whole houseful of fat, pink, clever kids. It would have been right and natural then but not now. Now he had missed his chance. Not even the dedicated gardeners of the Municipal Parks and Recreation Department could produce daffodils in October.

Now, to be sitting here, in this place, like this, now, with a woman like Agathe Stopak, now it was wonderment and a miracle. And yet it was true. Now, with the first frosts just around the corner, after a long, empty summer when there had been no time for armfuls of women, no tumbled, tousled, sheet-tangled dozens but two or, perhaps, a brief three—which is far, far fewer than one—here he was with Agathe. There would have been something to boast about in the dozens, something saloon-bar-ish, something cigar-puff-ish, something moustache-twirl-ish and there might have been something downright heroic about the one, the one and only but there was something pitiful and pathetic and dull about the three—three who never stayed, never stuck, never clicked. Tibo thought of them and he felt ashamed because he knew now—he had known for twenty-four entire hours—what it was to love. He loved Agathe. He was in love with Agathe. The times before—they were a kind of sickness. He knew that. And now he had found the cure.

She leaned forward a little, putting her head above the plate and, as she parted her lips and took the soft strings of pasta into her mouth, he felt his heart rush.

“Sorry,” she said and dabbed her mouth with her napkin.

“No. No. I was staring. Me. My fault. Sorry.” He could not drag his eyes away.

“One thing,” she said, to break the silence.

“Pardon?”

“Tell me one thing about you. Tell me your middle name.”

“I don’t have one. I am plain Tibo Krovic.”

“No,” Agathe said, decisively, “you are ‘Good’ Tibo Krovic. That’s what they call you. Did you know?”

“Yes. Somebody told me once. It’s quite a burden.”

“Mimi,” said Agathe.

“Your middle name? Your middle name is Mimi?”

“Would you believe it was my granny’s name? I know. It’s ridiculous.”

“I think it’s lovely,” said Tibo.

“Good Tibo Krovic is not a very good liar. Now it’s your turn. Ask away.”

He stopped to consider, tearing a lump of crusty bread to crumbs while he looked intently at the ceiling. “All right,” he said, “tell me what it would take to make you happy.”

“That’s not very fair, is it? I ask about middle names and you ask what it would take to make me happy!”

“Sorry,” said Tibo. “Too much. You’re right. I shouldn’t have. Sorry.”

Agathe put down her fork. “I’m not offended. It’s a good question. It’s a question I ask myself and you know, Tibo, I have no idea. I haven’t got a clue. There must be something. There must be somebody.”

“But you have Stopak,” said Tibo. It came out sounding more like a question.

“No,” said Agathe. That was all.

They looked at each other across the table then, so many messages, warnings, desires, pleadings and encouragements in that look, all unsaid, all understood, half believed and half imagined.

“No,” said Tibo.

“No.” She picked up her fork again. “Anyway, the rules of the game are clear, so now it’s your turn. You tell me. What would it take to make you happy?”

“Me?” said Tibo. “I’m happy. I’m perfectly happy.”

“Well, that’s good,” said Agathe. “That’s fine. But I don’t believe you. Oh, don’t look all offended at me. When was the last time you laughed?”

“Just now. Just a minute ago. With you.”

“Before that, when?”

Tibo was having trouble remembering. “It’s difficult when you put it that way. I laugh all the time. I laugh. I do.”

“I believe you do,” said Agathe. “What about friends?”

“Lots.”

“It’s not healthy to have lots of friends—quality above quantity when it comes to friends. And I’m not talking about people who know the Mayor of Dot. I mean people who know Tibo Krovic, people who know how many sugars he takes in his coffee.”

“I don’t take sugar,” said Tibo.

“I know that, I’ve made your coffee for years. Who else knows?”

Tibo made a resentful jab at the final knot of spaghetti on his plate. “I don’t think I like this game anymore,” he said. “You’re too good at it.”

Agathe reached across the table and offered her hand. She whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And then, with their fingers locked again, she asked, “How many sugars do I take?”

Tibo looked ashamed. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. You always make the coffee.”

“See?” she laughed. “You’re better off than I am. You’ve got one more on your list than I have.”

Tibo said nothing.

“You can ask, you know. You have my permission to ask.”

There were so many things Tibo wanted to ask but he decided to go slowly for a while. “Very well then, Mrs. Agathe Stopak, how many sugars do you take in your coffee?”

“Just the one. A flat one. Does that make us officially friends now?”

“I think it does, yes,” he said and he leaned forward to kiss the tips of her fingers but, just then, at the other side of the room, he spotted Mamma Cesare heading towards their table and he released Agathe’s hand with a bad-tempered sigh.

“Everything’s good?” the old lady asked.

“Lovely,” they chorused stiffly.

“Good, lovely, very nice. I bring you coffees now, very nice.”

“I think,” Tibo glanced at Agathe to check, “just the bill. We should be getting back to work. And we can get a coffee there.”

Mamma Cesare snorted her disapproval. “You maybe gets coffee but it’s not so good as mine. I am bringing bill. Tomorrow you are having gnocchi.” And she waddled off.

Outside again on Castle Street, Tibo asked, “Do you like gnocchi?”

“I’m not entirely sure what gnocchi is,” said Agathe. “Anyway, tomorrow’s Saturday.”

For a moment, Tibo was unsure why that mattered. Gnocchi—little potato dumplings—you could eat them any day of the week if you felt like it and then the full weight of Saturday hit him. Saturday. The weekend. Two whole days without coming in to work. Two whole days without any excuse to see Agathe. “Yes,” he said. “Saturday. Have you anything planned?”

“Not really. No. In fact, no.” She was hoping that Tibo might take that for an invitation but he said nothing in reply.

They walked on a little further and she tried again. “How about you? Have you anything planned?”

“Well, don’t laugh but I thought I might go shopping. Maybe buy a suit. Or even two.”

Agathe oooooooohed mockingly.

“Oh, don’t! I said not to laugh.”

“I’m not laughing. Yes, you could probably do with a new suit.”

They carried on down Castle Street in silence, Agathe stepping out beside him with that wide, easy, rolling stride that made men turn and look after her when she passed, Tibo tall and straight and elegant, each of them wondering if the other could read their thoughts.

Tibo did not say, “Damn my suits. To hell with suits. Can you imagine all the things I would like to buy for you? Can you imagine all the things I’d shower you with, every day, if I could? New
dresses, new shoes, furs and jewels and underwear, beautiful, beautiful underwear and sweets and pastries and flowers and champagne and knick-knacks and fripperies and trinkets and gewgaws and pointless, silly nothings.”

And Mrs. Agathe Stopak did not reply, “Do you know what kind of knickers I am wearing. Can you see? Can you guess? Very, very naughty. Teeny. Ridiculous. Can you imagine what sort of woman would wear knickers like those? I hope I don’t fall under a tram on the way home. What they’d make of knickers like those at the Infirmary, God alone knows.”

“Yes, a new suit,” said Tibo. “And I thought I might have a look at the brass band in Copernicus Park on Sunday.”

“On Sunday?”

“Yes, Sunday at one o’clock.”

“At one?”

“Copernicus Park, at one o’clock,” said Tibo emphatically. “It’s their last performance of the year. It always feels like the end of summer. The swallows go, the cranes fly south, the geese disappear from the Ampersand.”

Agathe laughed. “And the Fire Brigade Band packs up its euphoniums! Come on, Mayor Tibo Krovic, you promised me a cup of coffee!” And she started to run, clattering over White Bridge and into City Square. Before she was halfway across, Tibo was running too.

Mayor Krovic looked back on that afternoon in his office as the first of his life. That’s what love is like—it gives everything a new taste, paints everything in different colours, caresses the nerves with pin-sharp sensation, makes the tediously mundane bearable again. The coffee brewed that afternoon in the same old pot that had coughed and burped and spluttered on the table by the door for as long as anybody could remember was like no other coffee Tibo had ever drunk. For one thing, he made it himself—the first time he had made his own coffee in the Town Hall for a very long time—and Agathe sat at her desk and laughed out loud as he hunted for the coffee can and misplaced the spoon and scattered sugar across the floor. But she smiled graciously when he handed her the cup
and let her fingers trail over his for far longer than was needful as the saucer passed from hand to hand between them.

And then they talked, but happily this time, about life as they wished it might be, not as it was—not in a cold little town in the north but on the shores of a warm, wine-dark sea; not surrounded by thousands of people and none of them knowing how much sugar to put in a cup but with just one person who knew but didn’t care because there was wine to drink.

It came in sentences and half phrases, the little bits of truth and, in between, they spoke of that week’s programme at the Palazz Kinema and how wonderful were the raisin cakes that Agathe’s granny used to make and how you can’t get them like that anymore, not for love nor money, and what it was like to be nine years old and fish from the end of the pier and put crabs in a box to scare your mother with their rattling and clawing in the middle of the night or how awful it is to be alone, without love, and how odd it is that pomegranates are never in the shops for more than a few weeks.

Outside, the bells of the cathedral tolled out again. And again. The sky began to bruise.

“We should work,” said Tibo.

“Yes, we should,” said Agathe.

“I have work to do,” he said.

“Me too.”

“Yes.”

“Take that last cup of coffee with you, if you like.”