The Good Mayor (12 page)

She laughed at him. “It’s nearly the holidays. People are winding down. It’s not your fault. You can’t make business for the council to do.”

“Still. I can’t sit here all day. It’s like taking money under false pretences.”

“Go for a walk, then,” she suggested. “Keep an eye on things. Somebody’s bound to come up and bother you about something—some bit of broken pavement or some leaky drain or something.”

Tibo was not enthusiastic. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ve enough to fill my days,” she said firmly.

“Can I help?”

“No, you can’t. Go for a walk.” And she wiggled out of the room.

Tibo looked down at his blotter. It was just about possible to make out the shapes he had drawn there earlier. He traced round them again with the tip of his pen, brought them back to life then tutted angrily at himself and scored them out violently.

Good Mayor Krovic left his coffee cooling on his desk and strode out of the office. “I’m going for a tour of inspection,” he said.

And Agathe called after him. “If anybody asks, I’ll say you’re out for a stroll.”

Tibo walked down the cool green marble stairs and out into
the glare of City Square. He thought about a visit to the bookshop on the corner but ruled it out. Silly—he already had a house full of books. If he wanted more, Mrs. Handke, the City Librarian, would order anything he asked for. Not the bookshop, then. He left the square and turned left along the Ampersand, nodding at two old men who sat smoking their pipes on a cool, shadowed bench. “Fine day,” he said.

“Fine day, Mayor Krovic,” they said. That was all.

There was a lady with a big pram, loaded with shopping, and a sulking toddler hitching a free ride on the bumper and a blind man with midnight-blue glasses walking his panting dog. The man stopped, tucked his cane under his arm and took a bottle of water from inside his coat, holding it up high and pouring it out in spurts, randomly, where he guessed the dog’s mouth might be. Some of it went in.

As he turned into George Street, Tibo made a note to talk to the City Engineer about having the animal troughs on the drinking fountains repaired. It would be a nice thing to do. George Street. Turn right to the Palazz Kinema. No, that wouldn’t be right—not for a tour of inspection. Turn left to Museum Square. Yes—the new exhibition. Ideal. That was exactly the sort of thing that a mayor at a loose end should be investigating.

Long canvas banners hung between the pillars at the front of the museum, stamped with images of a winged lion and announcing:

They flapped like the sails of a resting galleon as Tibo passed beneath and walked up to the half-glass doors where smart attendants in brass-buttoned jackets waited to welcome visitors.

“Good morning, Mayor Krovic,” they said as they swung the doors open for him.

“Good morning,” he said. “Just thought I’d pop in.”

They nodded, smiling fawningly and somehow overcoming the urge to rub their palms together.

“Can this really be somebody’s job,” Tibo wondered. “Two
grown men standing here all day opening doors for people and bobbing at them. That can’t be right. Good grief, there must be shifts of them, cover for holidays and days off and sick days, armies of men in fancy jackets, opening doors on the rates. That would need looking into.”

The doors closed quieter than a coffin lid and Tibo breathed in the calm of the place. It washed him. He loved the museum. He had loved it from boyhood when his mother brought him, riding on the top of the tram. Tibo remembered the astonishment of it, the thrill of the Amazonian shrunken head in its case, dark and leathery, lips stitched shut with leather cords, eyelids peacefully closed, the whole thing the size of a fist and only the hair hanging down with the lustre of crows’ wings to prove that it had once been a man, an unsuccessful warrior, a gambler with a losing hand but a gambler at least, a warrior at any rate. And the stuffed lion—well, half a lion, just the front half—charging from a stand of dry and shrivelled grasses, its mouth a gaping cavern of teeth and red death. Tibo remembered the first time he had seen it—how he’d turned the corner and found it and how the clutch of panic had seized his heart. He could picture himself there, a tiny naked hairless ape, frozen in terror on a savannah of brown linoleum, watching death arrive from a glass case and his lime lollipop, like a shiny green planet impaled on a stick, falling from his grasp to shatter on the floor.

He walked among the museum’s granite pillars now and just ahead, in the shadows, he could see a little boy in a blue coat and a mother with packets of sandwiches in her basket to eat in the park later. “Whose pictures are these, Mother?”

“We share them, dear. They belong to everybody. You can come and see them whenever you like. They belong to you.”

The joy of that. It had never left him. “Mine. They belong to me.”

Tibo glanced behind the last pillar in the row. The boy and his mother were gone.

Good Mayor Krovic followed the shallow stair that curves upwards to the gallery, watched over by forgotten Dottians looking
down from muddy stained-glass windows. Tibo thought the carpet very nice. “Not at all municipal,” he thought. “Important. Metropolitan. Maybe we need door-openers after all.”

The upper corridor of Dot Museum is hung with boring landscapes, silly treacle-coloured oils with cattle standing up to their knees in ponds and glaring out of enormous frames or sheep wandering drunkenly through impenetrable fogs and a few early devotional works, altar pieces dedicated in my honour and that kind of thing. Tibo ignored them and walked briskly on to the main gallery.

The Waldheim coffee pot collection tinkled in its case as he passed. He didn’t notice. Tibo could see nothing but the vast canvas filling the back wall of the gallery. He hurried towards it. He wanted to rush up and hold it like a man who has been years in the deepest, darkest prison, suddenly released into the arms of his beloved. It was so lovely he forgot to breathe, indescribably lovely—or, at any rate, so Tibo thought but that’s not the sort of thing that is permissible in stories.

In stories, description is compulsory so imagine a huge picture, all but life size. Imagine walking into a forest glade in summer, just as the handsome young hunter in the bottom left corner has done. Imagine hounds bounding beside you. Imagine a quiver of arrows on your back. Imagine bright sunshine pouring through the trees in great custardy dollops of light. Imagine the heat of it. Imagine the thirst of the young hunter and his dogs. Imagine how they have longed for that bright crystal pool. Imagine his astonishment when he pushes back the branches and finds a goddess bathing there, fleshy and white, great milky flanks, ivory shoulders, rose-pink breasts. Imagine serving maids, naiads or dryads or nymphs or some such, all colours, all sizes, in various states of undress or sopping-wet transparency. Imagine rich, figured velvets strewn over the rocks and leopard skins so soft and downy they ripple in the passing breezes. Imagine the frozen glare of the furious goddess, discovered at her toilet, humiliated, violated. Imagine the horror. That was what Tibo saw. That and the image
of a beautiful city by the sea, rich with the plunder of her vast ocean empire where wonderful things like this went to be born.

He might have spent all day there, squandered the whole of his tour of inspection on inspecting just this one treasure but, when he remembered to breathe again, he noticed, filling the bench in front of the picture, the broad back of Yemko Guillaume. Tibo decided to leave quietly. He could come back later and he was just about to turn away when Yemko spoke. “Good morning, Mayor Krovic,” he said.

“Oh. Ah. That is … good morning, Mr. Guillaume.” Despite their lunch together the day before, there was something about Yemko Guillaume that left Mayor Tibo Krovic a little ill at ease and there was still that business about having him removed from the bench. “I didn’t. That is. How on earth did you know I was here?”

Yemko signalled at the walls with his walking stick. “I caught your reflection in the glass of that unimpressive little Canaletto. I ask you—glass! Glass is anathema to oil. And Canaletto! Mere holiday snaps from the Grand Tour! The way these pictures have been hung, the curator should be hanged.”

Mayor Krovic felt sure that Yemko had been waiting for some time for a chance to make that pretty verbal distinction. He passed no comment but, if Yemko was disappointed, he failed to show it.

“Won’t you sit beside me, Mayor Krovic?” he invited. “Let us spend a few moments together, communing in silent adoration of the Masters.”

Tibo managed to fit himself at one end of the huge leather bench which Yemko had annexed. It made a slight farting sound as he edged into position. He said nothing. He tried to banish from his mind all thoughts of how he must look. He chased the image of a penny-farthing bicycle from his head. He tried to relax. He tried to forget himself, forget where he was, who he was with, who he was. Instead, he imagined himself naked, wading into that cool green pool that lapped at Diana’s feet. He imagined sinking in it. He imagined looking up and seeing …

“Don’t you think Diana bears an uncanny resemblance to that secretary of yours—what’s her name? Mrs. Stopak?”

“Definitely not!” said Tibo. People turned to look. He had been a little too definite. He modulated to a cathedral whisper, “And, anyway, how do you know my secretary?”

“Mayor Krovic, you are a personality in Dot. Everyone knows you. Everyone knows all about you and Mrs. Stopak shares your mythic status. I apologise if I have caused you any offence.”

Tibo harrumphed genteelly.

They lapsed back into silence until, after a decent interval, Yemko said, “I have often wondered what people make of these lovely things,” waving his cane at the walls with a wheeze. “Now that their Bibles serve only to gather dust on the shelf, now that we teach them nothing of Homer, nothing of the great myths upon which our civilisation is founded, what can these lovely, lovely pictures mean to them? A beautiful woman with flaming hair and a severed head on a plate, a pale nude in a woodland pool surrounded by serving girls, glaring at a man and his dog. What can that possibly convey?”

“Perhaps they understand them as beautiful things,” Tibo offered. “It is possible, I think, to appreciate beauty without understanding it.”

“You think perhaps they understand them as beautiful things?” There was a forest of raised eyebrows attached to the remark. “As beautiful things? You mean they look at that young woman with a dead head on a platter and say to themselves, ‘What a lovely girl!’? Or they look at the pale luminous flesh of Diana, not knowing she is about to turn that baleful glare to a flash of divine spite and change poor Acteon into a stag for his own hounds to shred, and they say to themselves, ‘My word, what a corker! Wouldn’t mind taking her to the Palazz on Saturday night. And, by the way, what a nice dog.’ Something like that?”

“Yes,” said Tibo simply. “Something like that. After all, it is a very nice dog.”

Yemko sighed. “Good Mayor Krovic, the most amazing thing about you—and I say this with genuine warmth and admiration—
is that you honestly believe it. You honestly believe in sharing these beautiful things with people who can never understand them and could never be made to understand them. You believe in it.”

“You think me very silly, don’t you?”

“Not at all. Not at all.” Yemko gave a reassuring wave of his fat hand. “I admire your lack of cynicism. I wish I shared it. Truly I do. Truly.”

“It’s not a matter of silliness or cynicism. It’s a simple fact of life. People can admire, people can love, even, and never come close to understanding. They love God but never claim to understand. I doubt if there’s a man in Dot who understands his wife but they love them.”

“Some of them,” the lawyer observed.

“Oh, most of them! Anyway, I have to believe that it’s right to share these things. I’m a democrat.”

Yemko nearly laughed at that. “Yes,” he said, “that quaint idea based on the polite fiction that all opinions are of equal weight. Somehow it only ever seems to extend to the field of politics, never to matters such as plumbing or oceanic navigation or translation from the Sanskrit.” His vast body shuddered in a sigh. “Good Mayor Krovic. Poor Good Mayor Krovic, you must promise me you’ll never disappoint these people you care so much for. They’d tear you limb from limb. You’d be their Acteon. And promise me that, if you should ever stumble on Diana in the woods, you’ll allow me to help.”

“It won’t come to that,” said Tibo, “but thank you and, if it ever does, I’ll be at your door.”

There was a pause. Tibo suggested lunch.

“No. Thank you, no. I don’t think I could face it,” said Yemko.

“Another time, then,” said Tibo.

“Another time.” And, with a great effort, Yemko held out his hand. “Goodbye for now, Mayor Krovic. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll remain here with Diana for a little while.”

“Of course. She belongs to you, after all.” And Tibo withdrew with a smile.

He had almost reached the corridor again when Yemko called
after him, “My clerk will be writing to Judge Gustav this afternoon. You do understand?”

Without turning round, Mayor Krovic said, “The offer of lunch is still open.”

Tibo walked back down the corridor of gloomy landscapes and, just as the management of the museum demanded, followed the strange and circuitous route out of the building, past the diorama of the siege of Dot, past Admiral Gromyko’s unpublished manuscript chart of the Ampersand and on, with a grim inevitability, to the gift shop.

Description is supposed to be compulsory in stories but there is no need to describe a place like that. One museum gift shop is much like another with its souvenir pencils and souvenir erasers and souvenir sharpeners, the sort of things which any self-respecting child would curl his lip at in normal circumstances but which, on a museum visit, become dearer than life itself, more to be coveted than rubies, prized above the riches of the Indies. Museum gift shops are built on a firm foundation of stationery and, piled on that, come layers of posters and replicas and sensible books of the kind aunts like to give at Christmas, explaining the workings of steam engines or the private lives of penguins.