The Good Mayor (36 page)

“I hope so,” the woman said and she stepped out into the dark with a brave smile.

At the end of a day of surprises, Agathe took this last surprise in her stride. “I wonder how I knew that,” she thought as the door closed, leaving her the last outsider in The Golden Angel.

The waiters went to work, tipping chairs on to tables ready for
the morning mop, filling sugar bowls and salt cellars, ferrying the last of the dishes to the sink. Before the cathedral bells struck ten, the cafe had been scoured of every trace of customer, wiped clean, sparkled up and made ready for another day.

“Turn your chair up,” Mamma Cesare told Agathe. “We go.” And she led the way through that little swing door Agathe had seen on her first visit, into the dark side passage that burrowed into the back of the building. “Keep up,” said Mamma Cesare as she bustled ahead.

Agathe turned a corner in the twisting passage and saw her standing there in the yellow light of her bedroom door, beckoning. “Come quick. Come quick,” she said and disappeared inside.

When Agathe arrived and closed the door, Mamma Cesare was sitting on her bed, shoulders slumped, looking ashen and exhausted. “Come in. Sit,” she said. “Sit here.” She patted the mattress at her side and, when Agathe sat beside her on the complaining bed, she took her hand. “Very, very sorry,” said Mamma Cesare. “A bad, nasty old woman is what I am.”

“No, you’re not,” said Agathe.

Mamma Cesare patted her hand. “Yes, I am. Not nice to you but it’s only because I worry for you.”

“Oh, shush,” said Agathe. “You don’t have to worry about me. You’re just feeling a bit low. It’ll be better when the summer comes.”

Mamma Cesare made a watery smile that said, “When summer comes, it won’t find me waiting.” But she swung her feet to the floor without saying anything and picked up a big key from a dish on her dressing table. She gave a watery sniff. “Listen, you remember a long time ago, I told you that people tell me things and I listen?”

“I remember, yes,” said Agathe.

“I want you to meet some friends of mine. Help me move this.” Mamma Cesare’s dressing table stood where it had always stood, jammed into the only spare corner of the room, half across a plain pine door. She bumped at it with her hip, rattling the pins in the pin tray, jingling her potion bottles together, knocking over her
wedding photo in its worn frame, until it moved away from the wall a little. “Come, come! Help me. I’m an old woman.”

“In the cupboard?” asked Agathe. “You want to look in the cupboard?”

“Not a cupboard, silly girl—it’s a stair.”

Agathe gripped one corner of the table and tugged it forward. It moved quite easily, the way it would for a strong young woman in good health.

“Good. Enough. Now we can go in.”

Agathe expected a creak. She was looking forward to a passage hung with cobwebs and squeaking with bats but Mamma Cesare would never have put up with that nonsense. The light from her bedroom spilled through the half-open door and fell on a broad passage, hung with faded red brocade and a flight of curved stone steps rising into the shadows.

Mamma Cesare took Agathe’s hand and led the way. “You come and see,” she said.

Agathe brushed against a velvet rope that hung, like a handrail, at the wall and, higher up, golden shapes glinted as she passed, tridents and lion masks supporting the glass globes of old gas lamps. Then, as the dim light from Mamma Cesare’s bedroom faded to nothing behind her, a rainbow glow grew up ahead—golds and reds and blues and greens, pouring out on to the dark staircase through a stained-glass doorway alive with roses and lilies, swirling with foliage and, at the centre of it all, two faces side by side, one sobbing and one laughing.

“It’s a theatre!” said Agathe.

“Of course,” said Mamma Cesare. “You were expecting maybe a fish market?”

“But I’ve lived here all of my life and I’ve never heard of this place.”

Mamma Cesare snorted. “All your life. How long is that? Since the day before yesterday—and you never heard. The day after tomorrow and you forget.”

“Can we go in?”

“Can you think of any more silly questions?” Mamma Cesare leaned against the door and pushed her way through.

It was like walking into a jewel box two rooms high and dripping with golden flowers and bunches of fruit. All around the stage, fat little golden cupids were skewered to the walls like butterflies in a case, frozen in attitudes of amazement at the astounding things about to happen on stage, surely, any moment now. Half a dozen rows of red velvet seats reflected back from foggy silver mirrors that hung on the walls, all misty and crackled like a glass snowstorm, and lamps glowed from a rococo octopus of a chandelier high in the roof.

“It is beautiful,” said Agathe.

“Beautiful,” Mamma Cesare agreed.

“A beautiful, tiny, secret theatre. Who else knows about this place?”

“You, me, Cesare. He pretends he has forgotten.”

“How could you forget this? It’s wonderful.”

“He does. When he is just a little boy, it frightens him so much that he never comes back. Shut the door, lock it up, put the table in the way, pretend it’s not here. People do that, you know. People, sometimes, they lock the door and pretend.”

If Agathe recognised herself in that, she refused to admit it. She said, “But it’s lovely here. Why doesn’t he like it?”

Mamma Cesare took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. “That first day, when we open that door, everything is black. Everywhere, cobwebs and dust, lying like fur on the floor and hanging down, here, here, here, everywhere old boxes and paper and rubbish. Little Cesare, he runs away and doesn’t come back. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the theatre people.”

“Theatre people?”

Mamma Cesare took Agathe by the hand and led her down to the front row. “Here,” she said. “Sit here beside me and tell me what you hear.”

Agathe listened. The place was silent. “Nothing,” she said. She cocked her head and listened again. “Still nothing.”

“Maybe later,” said Mamma Cesare.

“What am I listening for?”

“You listen. I talk. Me and my Cesare, when we leave the old country, you think we want to come to Dot? What’s a Dot? Who heard of Dot? We only know America! You go to America, you work hard, you make lots of money and, one day, little Cesare is President of the whole States American. So we walk. We walk for days and days, my Cesare and me, and we come to the sea and we find a boat for America.” Mamma Cesare raised a stern little finger. “No questions. Don’t talk. Listen. What do you hear?”

“Only you,” said Agathe.

“Use your other ear! Two weeks we are on that boat, rolling round and bouncing up and down, but at least we have calm weather—that Cesare, such a man!” Mamma Cesare laughed until she coughed and coughed until she choked and pulled herself up with a wheeze.

Agathe looked worried. “You’re not well. We should get you to bed. I’ll make some tea.”

“It doesn’t matter. Listen. Keep listening.”

Agathe nodded and held the old lady’s hand. She was concerned. “I’m listening, I’m listening.”

“Two weeks on the boat, then, one night, the captain pulls back the covers on the hold and he shows us America. But the police are everywhere, he says. So we go down into his little boat and we row to the beach and my Cesare, he carries me through the waves and everybody is kissing and shaking hands and saying goodbye and then, in the morning, here we are in Dot.”

“Not America?”

“Not America.”

“Oh, God. What did you do?”

“We work. We work and we work and we work. I wash every floor in Dot, every shirt in Dot, every turnip in Dot and, for three weeks, we are so happy to be in America and then, a little bit at a time, we find out that we are not. What do you hear now?”

Agathe was frowning a little. “I thought I could hear a band.”

“I see it in your face.”

“Go on with the story.”

“One day I wake up and I know the truth but this is what people do. They know things and do not believe them. I say nothing to Cesare but Cesare knows and he says nothing to me. Then, when we are lying in bed, so tired from turnips, he tells. And we cry.”

“There it is again,” said Agathe. “The band. Can you hear it? They must be out in the street.”

“Maybe,” said Mamma Cesare. She turned her head to listen and her fingers began to move, as if in time to the music.

“You hear it too,” said Agathe.

“Maybe. So you want to dance or hear my story?”

“Story,” said Agathe.

“After that, we are so angry that we work even harder. We got a nice room over a little shop. Then the shop gets empty. We rent the shop and we start to make coffee and it’s like nobody in Dot ever tasted coffee before. Everybody loves us. And then, one night, late at night, after work, I go for a walk and here is The Golden Angel, all empty and broken and dirty, with its windows all boarded up and the theatre people, they come out and they tell me I can buy this place for nothing because nobody wants it and nobody comes near but I can have it if I clean up the theatre.”

“I’d have told them to clean their own theatre.”

“They can’t. They need me. They know everybody in Dot. They know everything about everybody and they pick me. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because we are the same. You ever hear of a pogrom? One day, a long time ago, the theatre people hear there is a pogrom coming so they pack everything up, the band and the menagerie and the fire-eater and the singers, all the wigs and the costumes and the furniture and they leave. But they never get to America and they come back.”

“They should make their minds up.”

Mamma Cesare said, “And you should maybe be a bit respectful.”

The glow of the theatre was shifting like a sunset. Overhead, the chandelier was dimming and there was an expectant flutter of
golden wings as shadows crept across the walls. It seemed to Agathe that most of the light in the theatre was coming now from the stage, as if the footlights had sighed into life but, towards the back, there remained a murmur of shadows. “They came back,” she whispered.

Mamma Cesare took her hand and held her down into the chair. “Nothing to be scared about. I am strega from long line of strega. I have the gift. My boy Cesare has the gift. And you. They like you. They look out for you. They worry for you, that’s all.”

“They came back!” It was all Agathe could say. She could hear the band quite clearly now, there, on the stage, not far off in the street but right there.

“Shh,” said Mamma Cesare. “Same thing happens with them. Bad captain. One day, he puts them down on a beach and says, ‘This way for America. With your drums and your performing dogs and your tambourines, you walk a little way and here is America.’ It’s a sandbank. And he sails away and the tide comes back and everybody drowns—all except for one little girl. This little girl they wrap up in a velvet blanket with red and gold stripes which is belonging to Mimi the Wonder Dog and they put her in a drum and she floats away. Now they come back here to wait for her.”

“But she must be dead.”

“Don’t tell them. It would make them sad.”

Agathe was squirming in her seat.

“Sit still before you wet yourself,” Mamma Cesare advised. “Look. Just watch. Look.”

Mamma Cesare knew the theatre people well. She knew their names and their stories. She could see them clearly but, for Agathe, it was like watching a photograph slipping into a bath of chemicals. Slowly, little by little, the image of them formed on stage, the beautiful dancers with their long legs and spangled tights, the strongman in his leopard skin, the dogs leaping through paper drum skins, the jugglers with their Indian clubs but she looked too long, left them too long in the developing fluid and the image thickened and darkened and disappeared.

“They’ve gone,” she said.

“No. Stop looking, then you see.”

“I can’t see.”

“Well, they see you. They want to meet you for a long time. And they tell me that man, the painter, is never going to make you happy.”

Agathe looked down at the floor and said, “I know. I left the painter.”

“No, you left the paperhanger. You went to the painter. You think I don’t know? You think they don’t know?”

On the stage, Agathe noticed the theatre people standing still, no dancing, no juggling, looking out at her. A blue blur, like a moving flame was flitting amongst them, the way a bird shifts from twig to twig and Agathe felt a heat of love and sympathy as it passed.

Mamma Cesare pointed angrily at the stage. “They know. You had a good man and you got rid of him.”

“Stopak was no good!”

“Who’s talking about Stopak? Look at them. Look at the stage. You think they don’t know? You think your granny doesn’t know?”

“Granny!” Agathe gawped at the blue light on the stage. “Granny, is that you?”

Mamma Cesare was exasperated. “Stupid girl! That’s not your granny. That’s my Cesare. You don’t see his moustache? Oh, you make me tired. Bed now. Bed. You go now. And remember.”

Agathe whispered, “But my granny had a moustache.”

GATHE RODE HOME ON TOP OF THE TRAM
, letting the cold wind batter at her as she went and trying hard to make sense of all that she had seen and heard. “But my granny had a moustache,” she said, time after time. “My granny had a moustache,” until it sounded so ridiculous that she started to laugh and, by the time the tram reached Green Bridge, she had realised that the whole thing was nonsense. It was obviously nonsense. It couldn’t be anything but nonsense. She was tired—that was all. Overwrought. A haunted theatre! A spooky strongman with pink tights and iron barbells! Nonsense.