The Good Mayor (18 page)

Tibo picked up the envelope and looked at it again. Two words. There was nothing else there. He put the envelope back on
Agathe’s desk and went into his office through the connecting door. But, a moment later, he returned, picked the envelope up and tossed it casually on to Mrs. Stopak’s blotter. He looked at it lying there. Was it casual enough? He walked past the desk, as someone would if they were walking through the office to see the mayor and happened to glance at Agathe Stopak’s desk. The envelope blared at him like a siren. He picked it up and threw it again. Still no good. Tibo grabbed the envelope and, this time, standing in the connecting door to his own office, he flicked it through the air towards Agathe’s desk. It landed in her wastepaper basket. He retrieved it and dropped it on her blotter as he sprinted through the empty office. Miracle of miracles, it was standing bolt upright on its edge, propped against her stapler.

Tibo looked at his watch. There was still time, he reckoned, to take the envelope downstairs and slip it into the mail. He took out his pen again and added:

Then he took the envelope, rushed down the back stairs and pushed it through the half-moon opening in the glass front of the concierge’s office. Tibo was breathless. He pushed his fingers through his hair and tugged down on the front of his waistcoat. He composed himself. He was ready to walk back up the stairs looking like the Mayor of Dot.

But, just as he reached the first step, the door of the concierge’s office opened and old Peter Stavo came out. “Oh, Mayor Krovic,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m sorry to bother you but this letter has just arrived. It’s for Agathe who works in your office. Since you’re going that way yourself I wondered if …?”

And, while Tibo was coping with Peter Stavo, Agathe was running up the green marble stairs with her coat flung over her arm. She walked into the office eagerly. “Good morning,” she called but
there was no reply. “Mayor Krovic?” She peeked round the door to his office. “Mayor Krovic?” It was empty. Disappointed, Agathe hung up her coat, checked her hair in her compact, decided that she would do and started the first pot of coffee of the day.

Sandor the message boy had already been on his rounds and the morning’s post lay in a tray on her desk. While the coffee brewed in its pot, Agathe sat down and began work but she had barely sliced through the first envelope when she looked up from her desk again, staring at the door like a dog waiting for the key in the lock. Agathe stood up and took a napkin from the pile beside the coffee machine.

She hurried into Tibo’s office, unfolded the napkin and placed it on her head as she bobbed a curtsey in front of the town shield.

Agathe told me, “What I said to you before—about Stopak? Well, no offence, but much good you did. And now there’s this. This with Mayor Krovic. With Tibo Krovic. And it’s supposed to be your job to speak up for the women of Dot and you know I’m not a bad girl but, sometimes … well, I just think you expect too much. You know how things are, I imagine. So, I don’t expect miracles and I’m not asking you to go against any principles but, if you could, please, try to be kind and understanding and even, maybe, a little bit generous, that would be very nice.” Then she said a polite “Thank you,” bobbed again and took the napkin from her head as she left the room.

When Tibo walked in carrying a letter, Agathe was already back at her desk, sorting the post into the usual neat piles. Tibo stopped in the doorway and looked at her with the sort of awe and wonderment that he might have looked at a painting or a sunrise. She was breathtakingly beautiful, plump and pale and pink and womanly, the colours and curves of the inside of a shell. He bent over her desk as he passed, drinking deeply of her scent. “This came for you,” he said.

“Oh, thank you,” said Agathe. “I wonder why it wasn’t in with the rest of the post.”

“That would be because I sent it.”

Agathe glanced down at the envelope and smiled, recognising
the mayor’s familiar handwriting. She sliced the envelope open. Inside were ten lottery tickets and a note but when she looked up to thank him, Tibo was already walking away. He did not pause to turn or look back until the door of his office had shut safely behind him and he could stand, hands behind him, flat against the wood, and draw breath quietly until the hammering in his chest subsided. “Done it,” he said. “See? That was easy enough. Just a letter. That’s all it was. Nothing to it, really.”

He took off his jacket and sat down at his desk to work while, just feet away, Agathe sat at her desk and looked from the envelope in her hands to his door and from his door to the envelope in her hands and back again, shaking her head with happiness and disbelief. “Lottery tickets,” she whispered, “Lottery tickets—ten lottery tickets. He wants me to have my little place on the coast of Dalmatia. Lottery tickets.”

She pulled them from the envelope to spread them across her desk and a folded sheet of notepaper fell out. “Dear Agathe,” it said, not “Dear Mrs. Stopak.” She noticed that. “I hope you enjoyed our little lunch yesterday as much as I did. If you’d like to join me again today, I would be delighted. My treat.” And it was signed simply “Tibo.”

Twenty minutes later, the longest twenty minutes of Tibo’s life, Agathe was standing outside his office door holding a cup of coffee with two ginger biscuits in the saucer. With her free hand, the hand holding a folded slip of council-headed notepaper, she knocked and, without waiting for an answer, she walked into the room like Venus returning home to Olympus after a long afternoon spent driving shepherds crazy with love. The grey clouds cleared with her arrival. Sunlight streamed through the open shutters and kissed her perfect toes as they passed over the carpet and Tibo looked up from his papers at her with the sort of look that men sitting in the electric chair give to telegram boys who arrive unexpectedly in the execution chamber.

Leaning over his desk, Agathe placed the cup carefully on his blotter. Good Mayor Krovic made a heroic effort not to look down the front of her blouse as it gaped invitingly in front of him. He
told himself that he had not noticed the unfeasibly tiny, the adorably transparent, underpinnings which he had most definitely glimpsed there and he forced himself to look her squarely in the eye when she said, “This came for you, Mayor Krovic,” handed him the fold of notepaper and wiggled out of the room.

Sitting back in his chair, Tibo opened the note and read it. It said, “I would be delighted to join you for lunch.” He was so astonished that he failed to notice Agathe’s whispered “Thank you” as she passed the town arms on the wall.

OR THE REST OF THE MORNING, THEY WERE
too embarrassed to speak to one another. There was a declaration that had been made—whatever it meant—but each seemed to agree with the other that there was nothing more to be said until the cathedral bells declared it was time for lunch.

Agathe’s typewriter clattered, her telephone jangled, the coffee pot emptied and filled again until, far off across the square, the pigeons rose like a widow’s veil over the cathedral and, a second or two later, the burnished, mellow “gong” of the bell reached the Town Hall and Tibo appeared in the door of his room. “That sounds like one o’clock,” he said. “Do you fancy …?” Tibo almost said “me” but he didn’t, he didn’t.

“Yes, I’m ready,” said Agathe. “I’ll just get my coat.”

Tibo was already waiting by the hatstand, her coat in his hands, holding it out to her, ready to ease it up her arms and over her shoulders. A whisper of “Tahiti” reached him as she shivered it into place.

“Colder today,” she said.

“Yes. Much. Yes.”

And there was another frightening moment when they wondered, each of them, if this was what lunch would be like—a string of foolish, empty comments about the weather, an embarrassed shuffle when they had hoped for a waltz and no escape from their shame for a whole painful hour.

Agathe took his arm or Tibo offered it; it hardly mattered now since it was what they both wanted.

“You bought me lottery tickets,” she said as they walked over the bridge and into Castle Street.

“Yes, I did,” said Tibo.

“That was very kind. Thank you.”

“Just a silly nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why did you buy me lottery tickets?”

“Don’t you play the lottery? Yesterday. I thought you said. Didn’t you? I thought you said you played the lottery every month.”

“I did, yes. It was kind of you to remember.”

“I remember,” said Tibo. “You play the lottery and, when you win—note ‘when’ you win—you will buy yourself a villa on the coast of Dalmatia.”

Agathe could have hugged him for that but he looked down at her with a brisk, businesslike “We’re here” and swung open the big, gilded door of The Golden Angel.

This time, the flicker of recognition that flashed round the room was enough to send Cesare’s dark Italian eyebrows shooting almost to the ceiling. His Honour the Mayor! Twice in one day for two days in a row! And with the same woman! Both days! The shock of their arrival sent the waiters into a spasm. From opposite sides of the room, from all corners, four of them started forward, rising on to the balls of their feet as light and poised as gigolos in an Argentine tango hall. But each one, as he moved, instinctively swept the cafe with his eyes, spotted a brother waiter in mid-tango, sank again to his heels, rose, stepped, glanced silently towards Cesare who stood, unmoving behind the counter, flashing his eyes, secretly semaphoring an eyebrow to this one and then that until each, in turn, stopped, halted, covered in confusion.

It was left to Mamma Cesare to save the honour of The Golden Angel. She stepped forward and, from somewhere below the level of Tibo’s chest, she said, “Table for two? This is way, please.” Small and brown, Mamma Cesare waddled in front of
them like a magic toadstool leading two lost children through a fairy story.

“This is nice table,” she said, inviting no discussion. “You like me to bring menu or you trust me to bring what’s good?”

Tibo sat down and smiled across the table at Agathe. “Just bring what’s good,” he said.

“Is nice,” said Mamma Cesare. “You two talk.” And she left.

“So what will we talk about?” Tibo asked.

“Lottery tickets—I think we should talk about lottery tickets. You were going to tell me why you bought them for me.”

Tibo rubbed a hand over his face in an embarrassed gesture. “You don’t mind, do you? I wouldn’t want to offend you.”

“Silly. Of course you haven’t offended me. It’s all right. I’m sorry. It was a lovely present. It doesn’t matter why you bought them for me.” Agathe looked down at the tablecloth and traced the pattern of the weave with the tip of her fingernail until Tibo stopped her by laying his hand over hers.

They were touching again for the second time in two days, the second time in their lives.

“I got you lottery tickets because I want you to be happy. All I want is for you to be happy. I realised, well, some time ago, that I have wanted you to be happy for as long as I’ve known you. If I could buy you that house you want on the coast of Dalmatia I would, but I can’t so I bought you lottery tickets instead. You deserve it. You deserve presents. You deserve everything.”

There was a pause. A moment of silence when nothing was said and nothing happened apart from Tibo’s thumb moving softly and slowly, backward and forward against the back of Agathe’s hand. Pressing there, there, on the padded mound of flesh between her thumb and forefinger, rubbing so gently that Agathe felt as if her skin would shred away under his touch. The feeling came back to her from when she was a little girl, staying with her cousins on the farm and she fell ill. Her skin had felt just that way then, before it happened, before she got sick, all raw and sensitive and open, as if it wasn’t even there and there was nothing to protect her from the world and every touch was like hot coals.

“They’ve given us the window seat again,” he said, after a while.

“Yes. It’ll be ‘our table’ before too long.” And then she wondered if she had gone too far and added a hasty “Sorry.”

“What are you sorry for now?” said Tibo. “Stop apologising. You have nothing to apologise for. Who has taught you to do this?”

“I just thought it sounded a bit presumptuous,” she said. “As if I expected you to take me for lunch every day. As if this was going to be a regular thing.”

“I think I’d like that,” said the mayor. “I think I’d like this to be a regular thing. If you would.”

“Yes. I think I would like that very much. If you would.” And then, after as much time as it takes to swallow really quite hard, she finished with “Tibo.”

The mayor noticed. “You called me ‘Tibo,’” he said. “You’ve never done that before.”

She squeezed his hand and smiled. “You started it. You called me Agathe.’”