The Good Mayor (2 page)

And then poor, good, love-struck Tibo would sigh and stand up and brush the carpet fluff from his suit and go and sit down at his desk with his head in his hands and listen to Agathe Stopak, clip-clip-clipping across the tiled floor of the office next door,
putting something in a filing cabinet or brewing coffee or simply being soft and scented and beautiful and on the other side of the door.

From time to time during the working day, like anyone else, Mrs. Stopak would leave her desk to attend to ordinary human needs and invariably she returned with her make-up restored to a mask of perfection, trailing clouds of limes and lemons and bougainvillea and vanilla and exotic scents that Good Tibo could not even name. He imagined the places they had come from—Pacific islands wafted with spices and tinkling with temple bells where tiny waves sighed on pink coral sands. He imagined the places they were now—little puffs of scent squirted on to the soft plump mounds behind Mrs. Stopak’s knees, on her blue wrists and dewing her milky cleavage. “Oh, God,” Mayor Krovic muttered to himself, “when you snatched my atoms from stardust, why did you make me a man when you could have made me into little drops of perfume and let me die there?”

OOD MAYOR KROVIC WAS UNHAPPY BUT SO
was Mrs. Agathe Stopak. On cold winter nights, she lay, shivering, in bed, listening to the rain drumming on the window, watching the curtains billow in the draught and wondering if they moved because of the wind outside or because of Stopak snoring beside her. He lay there, flat on his back, dead straight down one side of the bed as if a sword lay between them, with the sheets belled over his huge hard belly like a circus tent. The wind whistled down the chasm between them but, even without it, the bed was icy.

Stopak smelled of putty and whitewash. There were spots of paint on the grey vest he wore in bed, it clung under his fingernails and he snored like the steamroller she had seen spreading tar along Ampersand Avenue on the way home from work.

Stopak had always snored but, years ago when they were first married, she hadn’t minded. Back then, the bed was warm and Stopak would go to sleep every night, collapsed on her plump pink body, his head nestled between her big ivory breasts, his body covering hers like a blanket, one arm stretched down her belly and between her legs, the other doubled under the pillow. And he would snore, exhausted, and Agathe would lie there, glowing, and twine her fingers in his hair and whisper love to him as he grunted the night away.

She fed him well. She would race back from her job in the mayor’s office with good things in her bag and have them cooking
by the time Stopak came through the door and sat down at the kitchen table with its yellow daisy cover. But, in those days, Stopak never sat down before he had rushed up like a charging bear and grabbed her from behind and goosed her and kissed her and polkaed her round the kitchen until she beat him back with laughter and a potato masher and forced him into a straight wooden chair.

“Stop it!” she’d bark. “You’ll need your strength for later.” And then she’d kiss him with a promise and feed him tournedos Rossini and home-made game pie and roasted potatoes and clotted egg custards under crunchy sugar lids and apple crumbles and good cheese and, as he ate, she would tell him everything about the day—who had been to see the mayor, the school party that had toured the Town Hall or how the Police Chief’s hat had fallen off the desk and landed in Peter Stavo’s bucket of bleach and come out as white as a nun’s knickers—and they’d laugh.

And then, when Stopak had eaten, Agathe would leave her place at the table and hike her skirt up and straddle him in his chair and hold him in her arms and pull his hair and kiss him again and again until they fell into bed and, eventually, slept and the dishes could wait until morning. She loved him in those days. She still loved him, but not in the same way. Not that way. Now she loved him the way you would love an old blind dog. A pitying sort of love. The sort of love that’s not quite strong enough to reach for the gun over the fireplace and do the kind thing.

She loved him because he was the first man she had ever loved, the first whose bed she had shared, and, for a woman like Agathe, that would always mean something. She loved him because they made a beautiful daughter together and because, years ago, Stopak had stood beside that little cot like a broken scarecrow, screaming, weeping over their dead child. She loved him because his business was a failure, because he was broken and pathetic. She loved him as one might love an old teddy from childhood—not for what it is but because we remember what it used to be and what it used to mean. And that’s not how a man should be loved.

Stopak, for his part, did not love Agathe as a woman like Agathe should be loved. From the day they buried the baby, he
never touched her again. He came home from the cemetery, still bowed down by the enormous weight of that tiny white coffin, dark earth spotting his trouser cuffs, and, when the door closed on the last, damp-eyed guest, Stopak slumped into a chair, crying.

Agathe had crossed the room to kiss him quietly on the top of his head. She took his hand. It was limp as a fish. “Shhh,” she soothed and cradled his head against her spinnaker bosom. “Shhh, we still have time. We’ll be happy again. We can have more babies. Not like her.” The tears were rolling off Agathe’s chin. “Never like her. Not to take her place. Other babies for us to love and we’ll tell them about their big sister in Heaven. Not now. Soon.”

But Stopak only sat there with the look of a felled ox and, between sobs, he gasped out refusal. “No. No more. Babies. Not. Again. No. More.” He meant it. Life in the little flat changed. Stopak started to come home late from work. The food Agathe made for him dried in the oven or disappeared, like cinders, into the rubbish bin by the sink. But she loved him. She knew she could save him so she waited every night in the kitchen until he came home—whenever he came home—and mouthed her way through spoiled, parched meals with him. He ate everything without a word as if he was shovelling coke into a furnace. Once she even tried to trick him with soup, then cherry pie, then lamb chops but he ate it all in silence, just as he would have done if she had piled everything into one big basin and dumped it on the table in front of him.

The next evening, to make up for it, Agathe hurried home with a brace of pheasant. In the kitchen, she trimmed off their breasts and wrapped the meat in thick slices of dry, oak-smoked bacon. While it was roasting she sliced carrots and boiled potatoes and laid the table. It was ready when Stopak arrived and he ate it as if it was porridge.

Agathe looked at him in disgust and disbelief, pushing her fingers through her thick black hair, almost tearing it out with frustration. “For Christ’s sake, Stopak!” she screamed. “Say ‘That was nice’ or something.”

“That was nice,” said Stopak and he took the evening paper from the pocket of the jacket hung over his chair, flapped it open and began to read.

Agathe was heartbroken but she wasn’t ready to give up. She was a woman and she understood a man’s appetites. Above all, she understood Stopak’s.

The next day, as soon as the first peal of bells from the cathedral announced her lunch hour, Agathe left her desk and went into the mayor’s empty office. She wrapped a scarf round her head, turned to face the coat of arms hanging on the wall and murmured a hurried prayer. “Good Walpurnia, you gave yourself to be ravished by the Huns for the sake of the women of Dot. Well, I’m a woman of Dot and I want a Hun for my husband tonight. A Hun! It won’t save all the women of Dot but it might save one man. Help me. Please.” Then she dipped a polite curtsey that showed off her pretty legs and hurried out the door.

Agathe clipped down the Town Hall’s marble stairs in her high heels and trotted over White Bridge to Braun’s department store where she squandered a purseful of notes on several, almost invisible, items of underwear. “It’s all so expensive,” she gasped, “and it’s hardly even there.”

The elderly shop assistant smiled. “That’s because it’s made by fairies—woven from the cotton they find in the tops of aspirin bottles on the night of the full moon. Hans Christian Andersen wrote a story about it and some genius developed an entire mathematical formula to explain why the price of knickers rises as the size of knickers falls. Do you want them?”

“Yes, I’ll have them.”

“You’ll freeze to death. Listen, for the price, I’ll throw in a nice thick undershirt. Wear it.” She wrapped everything carefully in layers of pink tissue and sprinkled broken lavender heads between the sheets and tied it all in ribbons. Then she put the whole thing in a shiny red cardboard box, with “Braun’s” written on it in gold, and tied up with a yellow raffia cord.

It dangled hopefully from Agathe’s little finger as she hurried back to work and it sat in her in-tray all afternoon. When the sun
came through the office window and warmed it, wafts of lavender began to drift round the room. The scent of it thrilled her.

Agathe spent the rest of the day glancing from her work to the little red box and from the box to the clock above the door to Mayor Krovic’s office. She was tingling. Her stomach was fluttering. She went to mark up another entry in the mayor’s diary but her hand trembled so much that the pen left an ugly blot on the page. Coffee. Time for coffee. She must have some coffee.

As she stood by the machine watching the coffee splutch, splutch, splutch into the glass lid, Agathe danced from foot to foot, singing a song about “The Boy I Love” that her granny had taught her when she was a little girl. She had sung it to Stopak when they were first walking out together. It was only then, when she was older, that she had understood how naughty the words were. It made her happy. It made her happy to remember Granny and the old days with Stopak and the thrill of it—and the naughtiness—and it made her happy to think of that little red box and the naughtiness to come. She was happy anyway. It wasn’t the song. It was the box and hope that made her happy. A little box full of hope, like Pandora’s box but without the bad stuff. Just the hope and a little bit of naughtiness and she would be glad to let that escape out into the world.

The coffee machine gave a final snort, like Stopak just before he rolled over in the night, and Agathe poured out two cups—one for her and one for Good Mayor Krovic. Then, with a couple of ginger biscuits balanced in the saucer, she wiggled through the office, past her desk and towards the mayor’s room. Before she even opened the door, she heard him whistling “The Boy I Love.”

“I haven’t heard that song in a long time,” he said, taking the saucer. “My grandmother used to sing it.”

“Mine too,” said Agathe.

“She was a wicked old woman, my grandmother.”

Agathe laughed. “Mine too. She was the child of pirates, you know.”

“She was not!”

“No, truly. The child of pirates or a lost Russian princess.
Nobody knew. They found her when she was very small, wandering along the beach one morning, sucking her thumb and cuddling a velvet blanket with red and gold stripes. A kind farmer took her in and made her his own. But I think she must have been more pirate than princess. Imagine teaching a young girl a song like that!”

“All things are pure to the pure,” said Tibo. He pointed with his pen and asked, “Is that for me?”

Agathe was puzzled.

“The Braun’s box? A present for me?”

She was surprised and a little embarrassed to see the scarlet package swinging from her left hand. “This? Oh, this! This. No. Not for you. Sorry, I bought it at lunchtime. I must have picked it up by mistake. No. Not for you. Sorry. Just for me. Well, that is. No.” Agathe began to back out the door but Tibo called her back.

“Everything all right, Mrs. Stopak? I mean things at home. I know you and Stopak … well, a sad time. We were all very sorry. If you could do with a day or two off work, we can manage. I can get one of the girls from the Town Clerk’s Office to come in. It’s not a problem.”

Agathe put on a solemn face. “You’re very kind, Mayor Krovic, but, honestly, things are fine now. Things have been bad but they’re better now. Honestly. Much better.”

“I’m glad,” said the mayor. “Look, I won’t need you any more today. Why not take the rest of the afternoon off?”

That made Agathe very happy—after all, she had some new clothes she wanted to try on. She thanked him and left the office. From behind the door, she heard him shout, “And thanks for the coffee.” Good Mayor Krovic.

The sun was still sparkling in the fountains of City Square as Agathe left the Town Hall. With her coat thrown over one arm, she crunched over the gravel along the boulevard on the banks of the Ampersand. She strolled along the avenue, switching from pools of sunshine to dark blobs of elm-shade and back into sunshine, swinging her handbag as she walked in time to “The Boy I Love”
playing inside her head. At Aleksander Street, she stopped at the delicatessen to buy some bread and cheese and cooked ham but she came out with all that and more—a green papier mâché carton of strawberries, the first of the season, a bottle of wine, a bar of chocolate and, at the bottom of her bag, alongside the little scarlet package from Braun’s, two bottles of beer. “If St. Walpurnia does her job, he’ll need to build his strength up,” she said to herself.