The Good Mayor (23 page)

But he couldn’t rest. Some time later—it was too dark to see the clock—Tibo threw back the covers and dressed. He put on his new black suit and the polished shoes he had left standing at attention under his bed and he went out into the darkened streets. All the trams had stopped running. There was nobody about and he began to walk back to the centre of town but, when he turned the corner at the top of the street, Tibo saw the lights of a taxi coming
towards him. He would have hailed it but it was moving very, very slowly and canted over to one side so it almost scraped the pavement. Tibo was nearly sick with fear and shame. He knew that, although he could not see him, Yemko Guillaume was in the cab and he knew that, when it caught him, the doors would fly open and he would be dragged inside and then the cab would roll onwards forever, at a snail’s pace, with Yemko in there laughing at him until he was dead. He began to run and he ran and he ran but, every time he stopped for breath, head down, leaning on a lamp post, sweat falling in hot drops to sizzle on the pavement between the toes of his polished shoes, the taxi would trundle round the corner and he had to run again with the air scorching into his mouth and down his throat and burning his lungs.

“If I could only find a policeman,” Tibo said. “Why are there no policemen? What do I pay my rates for? I’m the Mayor of Bloedig Dot, you know!”

But he ran on and on, past all nine tram stops on the way to town and always with the terrible black cab rolling along all lopsided just a few yards behind, sometimes so close that he felt its tyres rubbing at the heel of his shoes, and he never saw a soul except for Sarah, who was sitting at the window of the second-best butcher’s in Dot holding a packet of sausages marked “Krovic” and crying her eyes out. “Here’s your sausages, Mayor Krovic,” she said, between blubs.

“Thank you, Sarah,” said Tibo. “Why are you crying?”

“It’s onion sausages and you’ve been a long time.”

So Tibo apologised and promised to come back and pay later but now he would have to go because the taxi was coming and he hoped she would understand and just then, when he looked back to the corner of the street, the slanting yellow lights of the cab appeared.

Tibo ran on again, turning into Cathedral Avenue and, as he ran, he tugged at the packet of sausages which Sarah had given him, ripping it open as he went and scattering sausages, one by one, on the road. Naturally the taxi had to swerve to avoid them—or sway slowly and lopsidedly across the road to dodge them where
they lay—but, as Tibo’s aim improved, he found he was able to hit the wheels with his sausages and send the taxi skidding in a pool of grease and meat. That meant it was miles behind when he reached the doors of the cathedral and ran inside and there was still no sign of it when he pulled open the door to the bell tower and started to climb the stairs. “You’ll never get me now,” he said, but he hadn’t gone very far before he turned a corner and found himself at the top.

And there was Mrs. Agathe Stopak, wearing the mayoral robes and she said, “I hope you don’t mind.” But, just then, she let them fall away and she was completely naked and pink and buxom, except for her stockings.

“Don’t look so shocked,” she said and then she jumped off the wall of the bell tower and grabbed the biggest bell in the cathedral and held on to it with her legs wrapped round it and she started to rock and sway, like kids do when they want to get a swing started in the park. “Come on!” she said. “Come on! Help me.”

So Tibo took a flying leap off his side of the wall and grabbed on to the bell and he sat on the edge of it, opposite Agathe with his legs all tangled up with hers and he rocked and he swung and, every time she pushed forward, he leaned back and, every time he pushed forward, she leaned back, rocking and laughing and yelling encouragement at each other. “Yes, yes, like that! That’s the way! Yes!” And, as Tibo looked down, down the middle of the bell tower, past Mrs. Stopak’s beautiful creamy thighs, down to the bottom where the floor was a tiny, shrunken square at the end of a long tunnel of perspective, he heard her say, “Isn’t this where you catch the tram?” and he screamed but nobody could hear him because, just then, the bell swung right over and rang with a terrifying “BONG!”

OW, IT’S WELL KNOWN THAT THE DOCtORS
say the dreams we think last the whole night long really last no more than a heartbeat or two. We fly for hours through clouds or stand all day, stark naked in the High Street or collapse into a laughing embrace with a mother who is not, after all, dead these thirty years or flee for miles pursued by phantom taxis, gasping and exhausted but, in the strange world this side of sleep, it’s all over in the flicker of an eyelid.

And so, when Tibo woke himself with the sound of his own yelling, tangled in the blankets and clutching his pillow for dear life, the Sunday carillon that started the whole thing was still ringing over Dot and into his bedroom.

Tibo was not a churchgoer. He enjoyed leading the council procession on its annual pilgrimage up the hill to the cathedral and, in moments of desperation, he would cry out—as all good Dottians are taught to do from infancy—to invoke the name of Walpurnia. Sometimes, he might even look up from his desk and talk to the bearded nun on the town arms as he would to an old and trusted friend. He regarded prayer as an opportunity to calm himself and to gather his thoughts in a quiet place but he did not believe anybody heard—not really. When he said the words, he meant them sincerely. They rumbled in his heart the way snow rumbles when it falls off the roof in a thaw but, in a little while, the snow is gone. It turns to mist or it trickles away in the gutter and there is nothing at all to show that it has ever been there. When
Tibo prayed, he knew he was talking to himself, not to me and certainly not to God and he knew that meant it wasn’t really prayer at all so, since he could talk to himself as well in his own kitchen as in the cathedral, he didn’t bother.

There were worse men than Mayor Tibo Krovic making their way to church that morning and maybe they needed it more but what Tibo needed was coffee and not going to church gave him time to make it. He shuffled to the kitchen by way of the bathroom. His body ached as if he had been sleeping on a mattress full of rocks. He was still tired, unrefreshed and troubled by odd, embarrassing, shaming bits of dream that lingered in his brain like cigar smoke lingers in curtains. He groaned and shook his head to chase them out but it didn’t work.

The image of Agathe’s stocking-tops and her white thighs and that deep, plunging, rocking sensation stayed with him strangely, the way the motion of the Dash ferry would stay in his legs long after he reached the quayside. But this wasn’t in his legs.

In the kitchen, Tibo measured four scoops into the coffee pot, put it on the stove and hurried to the front door to pick up the Sunday paper. There was nothing in it. The usual front-page story, the same one they seemed to have every week, hinting darkly at some failure in the provincial government that might or might not involve corruption or, at the very least, a serious dose of nepotism, possibly. That and the second female lead in the latest Horace Dukas picture caught up in some scandal with her chauffeur and a picture of a strangely shaped tomato discovered in a market garden near Umlaut. “That’s Umlaut for you,” Tibo said. “Home of the deformed tomato.” He threw the paper down on the table and got on with the business of making toast.

The rest of the morning was much as you would expect for a prosperous man living alone with nothing to do and too much time to do it. He finished eating. He found, despite propping the paper carefully against a square green tin of jam and examining it carefully, page by page, that there was not a single thing in it worth reading. He rinsed the dishes and left them standing on the draining board. He washed. He shaved. He went to his bedroom to
dress, holding the sleeve of his new black suit against his cheek, smelling it for that new suit flavour and, perhaps just to check that it was not stained with the sweat of a nightmare race through the streets before he put it on.

And then he put on his coat and found, in the pocket, the brown-paper parcel, tied with string, which he had placed there the night before. Agathe’s book. It was meant for Monday and Tibo reasoned that, if he took it with him now, it would mean he expected to meet her today, on Sunday at one o’clock, by the bandstand in Copernicus Park, which, of course, was absolutely untrue. If Agathe happened to be there, that would be nothing more than a happy accident so it would be pointless taking the book now. Silly and pointless and, in fact, it might even act as some kind of bad-luck charm to ensure that, if anything, she did not turn up at all.

He slid the package out of his pocket and laid it on the hall-stand. The front door closed with a bang, the brass letter box rattled, Tibo’s heels rapped like gunfire down the blue-tiled path and he passed under the damp and dripping birch tree, through the complaining, slouching gate and out to the street but this time he turned downhill, not up, heading for the park.

Already it was past noon and the sun was tipping in the sky behind half-hearted clouds, like a blurred lemon. The wind was coming in from the Ampersand, blowing slowly straight from the east over endless miles of steppe and a few extra miles of sea that couldn’t quite be bothered to freeze yet but, in spite of that, half of Dot seemed to be heading towards the park, mostly the nice half, the half Tibo was proud to represent, the half with rosy cheeks and polite, scrubbed children in knitted hats and polished shoes, the half that Tibo envied and the half that looked up to him and smiled and waved and nodded and said, “Mayor Krovic,” briskly in a cosy symbiosis of smugness.

Tibo was proud of the park too with its big arched gates of stone, almost like a little castle, and its fancy iron railings and that broad sweep of gently sloping grass that fell away under an avenue of trees to flatten and spread round an ornate and substantial bandstand with its bell-shaped roof of real slate.

He approached through the sunken Italian garden, an annual triumph by the staff of the Parks Department who defied the cartographers and the evidence of their own eyes to produce, every year in Dot, a little bit of Tuscany or Umbria—something warm and dry and basil-scented that reindeer might choose to nibble if only they could be bothered to walk a little further east. See, here he comes now, between the tall columns of cypress, self-conscious in his new suit, wondering if this is quite the right way to walk and if it was the way he walked yesterday and if he might not try to walk rather differently, in a way befitting the Mayor of Dot which yet did justice to his new Kupfer and Kemanezic suit. And walking this way brings him, from the north side, towards the bandstand, that strange octagonal structure, all red, white and blue cast-iron confectionery with gilded bits, like icing, towards the top. He is looking round now for a suitable chair.

The Fire Brigade Band concert is always popular and the last of the year is a gala event for the people of Dot. It’s a place for new hats—a place to be seen. Obviously Mayor Krovic would be quite entitled to take a seat anywhere in the front row surrounding the bandstand but that might be regarded as ostentatious. And to take a seat away at the back, in the sort of place where, really, nobody would know whether the Mayor of Dot had bothered to come at all, would be rather too modest. It might even be regarded, in its way, as showing off—as ostentation disguised as humility.

Good Tibo Krovic had been Mayor of Dot long enough to know that these things mattered and, even when he found a suitable chair, he could not sit down until he had been seen, until he had smiled and nodded at a few people whose names he could not quite, at that moment, recall exactly and certainly not until he had shaken hands with one or two local figures in the crowd: Tomazek the President of the Licensed Victuallers’ Association—“And this must be your sister. How do you do? Your mother? Oh, Mrs. Tomazek, I can’t believe it;” Gorvic, the Town Clerk, “and Mrs. Gorvic, a pleasure, always;” and, of course, Svennson, the Fire Chief, “Fine body of men you’ve got there, Svennson. Always do the town proud, they do.” And it was only when he turned away from that
sort of nonsense, turned round, ready to sit down in the slatted chair with its folding iron frame, two rows in from the front, that he had decided was just about the right one for the Mayor of Dot to be seen in, it was only then that he saw Agathe standing on the gravel path that circles the bandstand, out there, in front of everybody, in her bottle-green coat, holding her handbag modestly in two hands in front of her and waiting, politely, for him to be finished.

“Agathe.” When he said her name there was a smile in it. “I never thought … Well … This is nice.” And he started to edge out from the row of seats, apologising as he went, until he reached the meandering gap which the park staff had left as an aisle and he could walk forward to meet her on the gravel. He took her hand, not the way he had taken Svennson’s hand or even the way he had taken Mrs. Gorvic’s hand, palm open, thumb up, firm, dry, manly grip. He held his hand out to her with the fingers pointed down to the path and she took it, slipping her hand into his, her hand facing forward, his facing back and they stood, side by side like that, holding hands.