The Good Mayor (30 page)

She put the book down and trailed her fingers over the blankets, looking for the other one. It was plain and black like a Bible but, where a Bible is thick and squat, this was elegantly proportioned, slim, stylish. Where a Bible has pages that are cigarette-paper thin, these were thick and creamy white. With the book lying flat on the bed, she opened it and picked it up, one handed, and held it overhead, as if to read the ceiling and there, spread over two pages of plain paper, she saw herself, naked. Agathe gasped. She almost cried out. She nearly jumped from the bed but there was a naked man lying asleep on her. Quickly she turned the page. Another naked Agathe. And another and another. Pictures of Agathe, beautifully drawn pictures of Agathe sitting, walking, standing, stretching, running, lying down, all beautiful and all of them, every one of them, naked. Her mind flew to the postcard still pinned up over her desk. “More beautiful than this, more to be desired,” that was what it said.

And she realised, “I am more beautiful. I am more desired.”

“Do you like them?” Hektor spoke without moving his face from her breast, without even opening his eyes. She felt his moustache moving against her skin and the bristles of his morning chin.

“Oh, God, they are lovely,” she said. “Hektor, I had no idea. I never knew.”

“Well, now you know. But you don’t know the half of it yet.”

Hektor made to roll out of bed, putting his knees and elbows down carefully on either side of her so as not to squash her. For a second or two, they were touching again along their whole lengths and she felt him stir. He looked at her and smiled and kissed her nose, then he rolled on, out of bed and on to the floor.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“No. I’m fine.” Looking at him Agathe couldn’t help grinning.

“Coffee?”

“That would be nice, yes. Thanks.”

“I’ll make some in a minute. Something to show you first.”

Hektor went to the sink and tugged the flimsy cotton curtains off the window. “Need some light,” he said.

But Agathe had dived under the covers with a shriek.

“Hektor! I’ve got no clothes on!” She peeked out from the blankets. “You’ve got no clothes on! The whole street will see you.”

“Don’t worry. There’s nobody about. People in Canal Street don’t get up much before opening time at the Crowns. And it’s my house. If I want to go about with no clothes on, that’s my business. Now, look at this.”

From the gap at the side of the sink Hektor pulled out a large oblong canvas, covered in a torn sheet. “No, I’m standing in the light,” he said, “that won’t do.” He brought the painting to the foot of the bed and held it up. “Don’t say anything. Feel,” he said and he let the sheet fall to the floor.

Agathe had half expected to see another image of herself but she was unprepared for this. The picture glowed with colour and life and animal heat. It warmed the room with a kind of lust. She could feel it in every brush stroke, a dark longing that Hektor had carried with him for days or weeks or months and caressed and pounded into the canvas. She lay, the painted Agathe, on her right side, her back turned to the room, hair piled high on her head and a few loose curls falling temptingly from her neck. She was stretched on a couch of plump cushions, nestled in velvets and rich silks and putting them to shame with the soft, pale simplicity of her skin. But there was more, for the whole of the background was taken up with a giant
mirror in a gilded frame and she lay there, smiling, completely exposed, front and back, every rose-pink cello curve of her wantonly on show.

“It’s based on a famous picture,” said Hektor. “It’s called
The Rokeby Venus
by a man called Velázquez. What they call an Old Master. You probably haven’t heard of him.”

“Oh, no. I recognise it.” Agathe had thrown back the covers and she was crawling along the mattress like a tigress confronting a rival. The painting fascinated her and appalled her. That look, that knowing smile, reflected in the mirror, the hunger in her eyes. How could he have known that? How could he have painted that?

Hektor gestured over the canvas with a finger. “I made the mirror bigger. In the old days they only had little ones and I wanted …”

“I know what you wanted—you wanted all of me.” Agathe was kneeling at the end of the bed, gazing at the picture, forgetting the morning cold and the drawn curtain and the window on the street. “You wanted all of me.” She reached out to brush the painting with her fingers but Hektor danced it away.

“Don’t touch,” he said.

With the picture gone, Agathe collapsed back on the bed like someone released from a spell. She stretched out on her back and writhed slowly, pouting, dancing to the music of words only she could hear—more beautiful than this, more to be desired. “Hektor wanted all of me,” she said, “and Hektor can touch me if Hektor wants.”

“Hektor wants.”

“Draw the curtains,” she said.

Draw the curtains. That’s probably very wise advice. With the curtains closed, even those thin and skimpy curtains, there would be nothing to draw attention to No. 15 Canal Street, nothing to startle the pale children with their thin trousers and leaking shoes as they pelted each other with snowballs on the way to the Eastern Elementary School and, if a barge full of coal should happen to be passing along the canal, there would be no reason for the captain to gawp and run backwards along the deck so he could stay level with the window for as long as possible, not the slightest clue that
a beautiful young woman was in there, making love with her husband’s cousin for, what, the fifth time since lunch yesterday. Draw the curtains. It’s sensible advice for the people who read stories, as much as for the people in them. Draw the curtains and wait outside in the snow for a bit until Agathe opens them again, just as she did that morning, all washed and dressed with her hair brushed and her make-up done. And, when she opened the curtains again that morning, the omelette pan was washed and the vodka glasses were rinsed and sparkling and the coffee pot was hot on the stove.

Agathe put it on a tray with a bottle of milk she had found outside on the bathroom window sill, two blue cups and a green sugar bowl. Wet spoons had set the sugar into a solid lump but a few pokes with a fork had broken it up again, more or less. She carried the whole lot to the table in the middle of the room, where Hektor was seated, in his shirtsleeves, reading yesterday’s early edition of the
Evening Dottian
.

And then a strange thing happened. That sob which had been hanging around the corner of her mouth as she ate her soup in The Golden Angel only the day before, hanging round and pretending to be a laugh, suddenly came back. Agathe sat down at the table and began to pour the coffee and, just as she did, she started to laugh. And she laughed until she cried, laughed and laughed with two hands over her face, hiding her eyes until she sobbed and choked and wept, until she was doubled over, wailing and beating the table with bunched little fists and letting the tears roll off her face on to the striped oilcloth.

Stopak would have been frightened by something like that. Tibo too, for that matter, but he would have touched her, put an arm on her shoulder, patted her hand and cooed soothing noises until it passed. But neither of them would have understood it or known how to react. Hektor was wiser. He sat at the other end of the table, sipping hot coffee and reading the racing tips, snatching a glance at her from time to time but saying nothing, not touching her.

Even when the sobbing was past, he said nothing. When she lay, rolling her face on the table and moaning, he never said a word.
When she was still and sniffling softly, Hektor made no sound. He kept reading the paper until Agathe dragged herself up from the table, ran the cold tap in the sink and washed her face and took a dish towel from the rail on the front of the stove and balled it into her eyes. Even then, he said nothing. Even then, he waited until the alarm clock on the window sill had ticked out twenty tiny, tinny ticks and only then he put down his paper and set his cup back down on the tray and said, “It had to come out.”

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, God. What have we done? Hektor, what have we done?”

“We’ve made each other very happy—that’s what we’ve done. Well,” he looked modestly at the tablecloth, “at least you have made me very happy.”

She flapped the dish towel at him. “You made me happy too. A lot.”

“I didn’t mean that way,” he said. “Look, I really mean this. If you regret last night, then it never happened. Go to work and say you slept in. Stopak won’t even notice you weren’t home. He’s probably still sleeping it off as usual. Go round the corner, give him his cup of coffee and he’ll never be any the wiser. He won’t hear it from me.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Tell me what to do,” she said.

“I’ll never do that. Promise.”

“Then tell me what you want to do. Tell me.”

“I want you to move in with me.”

“Oh, God.” She buried her face in the dish towel again.

Hektor left the table and came to stand beside her, holding her by the shoulders and cradling her face against his chest. He said, “Agathe, listen to me and, if there’s a word I say that isn’t the truth, you’ll hear it and know it. I love you. I have loved you from the day you married Stopak and I danced at your wedding. I love you. And Stopak is killing you. Day by day, he is killing you and it makes me want to kill him. If you want to stay with him, you can. If you want to come to me sometimes for things that Stopak doesn’t give you, I
won’t deny you but I love you and I want us to be together. Come to me.”

Agathe said nothing for the longest time and then she sniffed. “I love you too, Hektor. I love you. Oh, I love you.”

“So it’s settled, then?”

“You want me to come and live here?”

“I thought we’d go to Aleksander Street. Swap with Stopak.”

She pulled away from him. “Hektor! No! You’re not serious.”

“I’ve worked it all out. He’s a reasonable bloke. I’ll just explain the situation and he’ll see right off that two need more room than one and I’ll get him packed up and bring him round here. You don’t have to see him.”

Agathe covered her face with the dish towel. Shame was burning in her chest like bile. “Hektor, he’s my husband. You can’t do that to him.”

“Look, it’ll be simple.”

“It’s not simple. You’ll lose your job for one thing.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. He’s not going to keep paying the man who stole his wife.”

Hektor took her by the hand and led her back to the table. “Sit down,” he said. “You should know some things. Things you know but won’t admit you know. You’re a widow, Agathe. Stopak is dead. The man you married is dead. He’s been dead for ages. It’s just the drink that keeps him alive. He lives on beer and vodka like a vampire lives on blood and, as long as he gets that, he doesn’t want anything else. I didn’t steal you. He threw you away. If I went round there now, I could buy you for a crate of vodka. Your conscience is clear.”

But her conscience was far from clear. Yesterday she had been at the middle table of three, right in the front window of The Golden Angel, whispering “co-lour-ful” at Tibo. Today she was in a flat in Canal Street, telling her husband’s cousin that she loved him. “There’s more. Things you should know,” she said.

“I don’t want to know a damned thing. What’s past is past. My
mum told me, It doesn’t matter who was first as long as you’re the last.’ That’s all that counts. So I’ll go round there and tell Stopak what’s what and we’ll go off and paint some houses and, tonight, you come home as usual.”

“Oh, God, Hektor, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. Let me come home here to you. I can’t go back there. There’s the neighbours and Mrs. Oktar in the shop. I can’t. I can’t. But I love you. I do love you. I love you. Let me come here. Please.”

He nodded and held her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers. “If that’s what you want, come here—if that’s what you want.”

She was happy then and smiled and kissed him some more—little kisses over his eyes and his nose and long ones on the mouth. “I love you,” she said. “You know. You’ll laugh. Don’t laugh. You’ll think this is silly but it’s not. A long time ago—I was thinking about this in bed last night when you were snoring …”

“I don’t snore.”

“Yes, you do.” And she kissed him again. “While you were snoring, I was thinking and I remembered, a long time ago, this old lady I know told my fortune and she”—kiss—“told”—kiss—“me”—kiss—“that I would”—kiss—“journey over water”—kiss—“and meet the love of my life”—kiss. “And when I ran over White Bridge yesterday”—kiss—“I met you.”

Hektor laughed.

Of course he laughed and of course Agathe did not love Hektor. She loved Tibo. She even loved Stopak a little, in a sad, pitying, regretful, nostalgic kind of way. She didn’t love Hektor, but Agathe was not the kind of woman who could spend the best part of a day rolling around in a hot bed with a man if she did not love him. Agathe was a good woman. The other kind can do that sort of thing and just accept it for what it is—a bit of harmless fun, an amusement, a release, the answering of a bodily need like eating a sandwich or going to the lavatory—but a good woman like Agathe would shrink from something like that with a black-burning shame, the way that a slug shrinks from salt. It was an impossibility. It was literally unthinkable for her. She simply could
not have formed that idea in her head so, out of gentleness and kindness and to protect her from the agony of madness, her mind embraced another, equally impossible impossibility—Hektor was the love of her life.

It’s not so unbelievable. Each of us makes up stories to help us make sense of the way things are. From the strange process in our brains that turns the world right-side up although everybody knows our eyes see it upside down, to the charming belief that “everything will work out fine in the end,” from the hopeful phantoms that linger round lottery kiosks to the lasting conviction that, if only our fathers had been a little nicer or if only we had studied a little harder for that exam or if only we had worn the other tie to that interview, everything would be all right now—everybody does it.