The Good Mayor (20 page)

“Yes. Thanks. I will.”

Tibo walked backwards to his office, looking at Agathe all the while over the rim of the cup held at his lips like a toast, looking right in her eyes and walking backwards until he turned the corner into his own room, through the door to where the carpet was thick and he was, quite suddenly, alone. “I really must work,” he called.

“And so must I,” she said.

“No, but really.” Tibo sat down at his desk and took out one of Agathe’s red files, opened it and sat looking hopelessly at the papers. His mind was busy with thoughts of her—no room for municipal nonsense.

“Do we care about the regulation height of gravestones?” he asked, loudly.

“New rules on cemetery memorials and stuff. It’s all coming up at the Parks Committee on Tuesday. I put the papers in your folder.” Agathe was gasping and grunting from the other side of the door and there was a lot of noisy clattering, chairs scraping across the floor, the sound of furniture shifting.

Tibo got up to investigate. “What are you doing out there?” And he met her coming into his room, struggling with a small table. She held it wedged across her hips, trying to nudge it and nose it through the door and into the inner office.

“Surprise!” Agathe grinned like a fool. “I thought I could bring this in. Maybe we could work together for a bit. Get on faster. I brought the biscuits too.” And there they were—a packet of ginger biscuits, teetering on the edge of the table she was carrying.

“Put that down,” Tibo ordered.

“You don’t want me to sit with you?”

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Give it to me.”

He took the table and put it close up against his desk, touching, right opposite his chair, a bit of alien territory annexed by his blotter. “I’ll get your typewriter,” he said.

Agathe trotted behind with her chair and a ream of council-headed paper. “This is fun,” she said as she sat down and flicked through a notebook.

“This is lunacy,” said Tibo and he glanced at her and smiled and shook his head. “Madness.”

But they got the work done, passing the biscuits across the desk, crunching and munching and sweeping crumbs on to the carpet in gritty little heaps, sitting for long minutes, looking at one another, just looking and each careful never to be looking when the other was and piles of paper started to mount on their desks, moved from one side to the other and safely closed up in dull, proper, spinsterly folders.

And then Tibo reached across his desk and lit the lamp. Shadows leapt up in the corners of the room. “It’s late,” he said. “After five o’clock.”

“I can stay,” said Agathe.

“No. You mustn’t. Better not.” There was a kind of warning in his voice and a plea. “It’s the weekend. You’re entitled.”

“Yes,” she said. Agathe stood up and stretched, all line and curve and movement and beauty and sadness. The weekend. That word again. The long two days. The lonely time. And all that time, night and morning, the ferry would be sailing back and forth to Dash with couples standing along the rail or holding hands in the prow or laughing in the saloon and then, when it reached the islands, they would grab their bags and run up the pier and find an inn with a smoky fire and clanky plumbing and fall into bed with a bottle and laugh and roll around and love but Agathe wouldn’t be among them and, on Sunday at one o’clock, Tibo would be sitting down in Copernicus Park with the Fire Brigade Band. “Yes. I suppose I’d better be going,” she said.

Peter Stavo’s bucket clanked out on the landing. His mop sploshed and swished like an escaping squid.

“I’ll just put this table back.”

“No,” said Tibo. “Don’t be silly. I’ll do that. You run along.”

“All right. Thanks. Goodnight,” and she paused, “Tibo.”

“Goodnight, Agathe. Goodnight, Mrs. Agathe ‘one flat teaspoon’ Stopak.”

She smiled at him and, in a couple of swift paces, she was outside the door again. “This was fun, wasn’t it? Lunch and everything. Nice.”

“It was wonderful,” said Tibo. “Lunch and coffee and this. Everything.”

“Everything. Yes.”

He heard the sound of the hatstand rocking and pictured her putting her coat on. Faintly, he heard her say “Bye” to Peter Stavo and then the place went quiet.

N JUST THE WAY THAT EVERY MOMENT WITH
Agathe had suddenly become that much more vivid and sharp, when she walked out of the office, the world turned sepia for Tibo. There was a tram ride home, an evening paper, a bowl of soup from the pan he had made three days before, a bath and bed and he recalled none of it. And then it was Saturday and the drumming, the heartbeat, the toothache started again. Agathe, Agathe, Agathe—her name, round and round in his head.

“Shops!” Tibo told himself as he tipped his half-full coffee cup into the sink. “Suits. Come on, Krovic, make an effort.” He gave his pockets a hasty slap, just to check that wallet and keys were in their proper place, banged the door shut so the big, brass letter box jangled and stepped out along the blue-tiled path. Beads of dew were waiting in a fringe at the bottom edge of the bell that hung by the street and Tibo noticed a few yellow leaves from his birch tree clinging damply to the gate as it slouched across the step at the end of the path. “I must do something about that,” he said. “I really must.”

The trams that serve Dot on a Saturday are very different from those that roll through the streets the rest of the week. On Saturday, they are busy all day and not just when they carry people to work first thing in the morning or back again at the end of a long and trying afternoon. On Saturday, the trams are full of children—sour-faced brats dragged unwilling to the shops with their mothers, troops of them with rolled-up towels tucked under their arms heading
for the Municipal Baths or coming home again, shivering, with their hair soaking and plastered down flat over their skulls, aunts and grandmothers dressed up for coffee and torte in Braun’s or returning, each with seven large parcels held together with finger-slicing string, big sisters in giggling convocations preening over one another, tittering towards the Saturday dance, big brothers who like to travel in to town on the top deck, standing up against the taffrail with their mates, facing backwards and talking too loud so that half the passengers sit fretting about the
Evening Dottian’s
most recent article on the razor gangs that might be stalking the city and the other half sit hoping for an overhanging branch to appear unannounced and sweep the tram like a sabre.

Mayor Krovic did not mind. Heading into town, the conductor let him share the platform at the back of the tram and they clipped along, leaning over at the bends with a shriek of iron wheels while Tibo read the paper, one arm hooked round the white-painted pole, knees sagging, hips swaying as he soaked up the motion. “Insouciant,” Tibo said to himself. He imagined the people on the pavement must think him vaguely piratical as he hung there. Nobody noticed.

The tram slowed for its final turn into Cathedral Avenue, slowed and wobbled and Mayor Krovic turned and stepped backwards off the platform, landing surely on the cobbles with balletic grace, tall and confident and he raised his folded paper to eye level and snapped it away in a courteous salute.

As the tram disappeared behind the houses, the conductor waved back and smiled. “Good day, Mayor Krovic,” he yelled.

Tibo opened his wallet and took out a folded envelope. On one side it read, “Mayor T. Krovic, Town Hall, City Square, Dot” and, on the other side it said, “onions, sausage, chicken, lentils, carrots, book” and, underlined twice, “suits.” Tibo liked to have a list. He ran his eye down it and planned the day.

“Book,” he thought. “Knutson’s.”

Tibo waited until a coal lorry from Schmidt and Hodo lumbered past then he dodged into the traffic and ran across the street. There is a broad flight of stone steps that forms an alley leading
from Cathedral Avenue towards where Commerz Plaz joins Albrecht Street and, about two thirds of the way down, on the right hand side, is Knutson’s bookshop. The stairs leading down to the shop open out into the alley in a gentle fan with an iron rail up the middle for safety and, at the bottom, a double sweep of broad bow windows, filled with tiny panes of old green glass, all bubbles and ripples so that looking at the books inside is like trying to peer at a library at the bottom of a lost lagoon. The shop front is painted green, a dark dusty green, the colour of an aspidistra in a great aunt’s parlour, and, if the paint looks thin, it is unbroken and unblistered. Written above the door in gold letters of a classical design are the words:

Tibo loved that place. He loved every moment he ever spent there and he counted them all out from the loud and confident “ping” of the bell as he opened the door until it rang behind him again when he left.

Tibo still had on his shelves the very first book he had bought from Knutson’s—a boyhood purchase he made on a day of rain when the water dripped from the hem of his coat and ringed a puddle on to the dark wood floor like a forbidden, coaster-less glass on the table at home.

“Everything in that box is the same price,” Mrs. Knutson had said. “Special offer—one each.”

Tibo remembered standing there, considering what to buy. He fretted for so long that Mrs. Knutson left and her husband was standing at the till when Tibo handed over two old volumes.

“Now then, young man, what will we charge you for these?”

Tibo remembered the feelings of embarrassment and concern that flooded over him then. Money was short—so short that he could not afford to be dainty about it. He looked forward to the day when he might pretend not to count the pennies and there was
a dry squeak in his voice when he said, “The lady told me they were all the same price—one each.”

Mr. Knutson raised an eyebrow above the line of his spectacles. “Well, the lady should not have said this very foolish thing since the lady has not gone through the box like you have gone through the box.” The shopkeeper stopped to consider. “At this price, you can buy only one. So which do you want?”

“Thank you,” said Tibo. He knew he was being tested.

A big question was being asked of him, this young man—this boy—who dared to stand on his dignity, here, in Knutson’s bookshop and demand his rights while he dripped marks on the floor. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll take this one.” And he laid a finger on the spine of an illustrated Dante.

“You’re sure?” said Knutson. “Absolutely sure? You can still change your mind. You can have the other if you want.”

“No, thank you, I will stick with that one.”

“Then I will wrap it for you.” Mr. Knutson spooled off a length of brown paper from the roll that hung at the end of his desk, tore it cleanly across and wrapped the book with an experienced grace. He held out his hand for the coin.

“I’m sorry,” said Tibo. “I only have a five.”

“So now I have to give you four back? Mister, you don’t know what you’re doing to me. You’re killing me here.” Mr. Knutson cranked the handle on his cash drawer and it opened with a metallic ring. He counted out four coins into Tibo’s hand with a grudging and constipated gesture and he kept a hard eye fixed on him all the way to the door. “You made the right choice. It’s worth four hundred,” Mr. Knutson said.

Tibo was aghast. “I’m really very sorry. I’ll put it back, of course.”

But Knutson raised a forbidding palm. “You will, of course, not put it back, of course! You and me, we made a deal. A deal is a deal, Mister—you should learn this. Nobody got cheated here. Nobody ever gets cheated in Knutson’s shop—not ever. It’s a matter of honour. But please, for the love of God, carry it home under
your jacket. It’s raining out there.” And he turned his hand from a raised stop sign to a wave of dismissal.

The cold, bright ping of the bell that sent Tibo out into the alley that day welcomed him back to the shop now. And, inside, everything was the same, except for the place where Mr. Knutson had once stood and where now Mrs. Knutson stood alone, a single bookend, an odd volume.

She greeted him warmly as “Mayor Krovic!” although, after so long, after knowing him from boyhood, she would be entitled to use his name.

But Mrs. Knutson seemed to feel that it did her shop credit to have the Mayor of Dot as a customer and she took a proprietorial, motherly pride in using his proper title—not just any book lover coming in to stand amongst the shelves and take down a volume and open it up and test the spine and examine the colophon and check, yes, there it is, the “e” on page forty-six when it should be an “a,” not just any customer but Good Tibo Krovic, the Mayor of Dot himself, you know.

“Mayor Krovic,” she announced to the whole shop, “always a pleasure to see you. Is there something particular we can find for you today?”

“Mrs. Knutson,” Tibo offered his hand, “you look well and as lovely as ever. I’m just looking, thank you.”