The Good Mayor (9 page)

“I don’t know before what,” said Agathe, “but I’ll know it when I see it and it’s not ‘before’ waiting at the tram stop to go and see some mad old lady I never spoke to ‘before’ this morning.”

She did a little dance, tapping from heel to heel in the tram shelter. “Ten minutes! Ten Minutes. I’ll give them ten minutes. If it’s not here by the time I count to a hundred, I’m going home.”

And she began to count as she danced. “One elephant, two elephant, three elephant …” By the time she reached “a hundred and sixty-three,” the tram was waiting at the junction, its single headlamp glowing in the dusk.

It clanked up to the stance, slowed, stopped, let Agathe hitch her skirt and climb aboard and clanked off again over the bridge.

Agathe had the tram to herself. She sat primly, knees together, holding her handbag on top of her thighs. The conductor said, “All right, dearie?” and Agathe hated that. She knew he was going to say something stupid like that.

Why couldn’t he just have said, “Good evening, where to?” or “Yes, Miss?” or something polite and straightforward? But, no, it had to be “All right, dearie?” as if this chirpy display of bravado on an empty tram would suddenly ignite her libido and make all her clothes fall off. She gave him a cold glare, one of her “shrivellers” and said, “Castle Street,” with a heavy strain on “please.”

“That’ll be …”

But Agathe cut him short, tipping a column of coins into her palm with a magician’s ease. “I think that’s right,” she said definitely.

The conductor punched out a short green ticket from the machine that hung at his waist and went to stand on the back platform. He looked at her from there, dangling by one arm from the pole on the step, swinging out over the rushing pavement.

Agathe’s disgust was bottomless. She refused to reward him with even a glance but the trees where she’d watched the birds that morning were passing by only as dark shadows now. She concentrated instead on reading the advertisements that ran along the edge of the ceiling, a small milky light bulb burning between each.

And there was a picture of an old man, leaping out of a bath chair to do cartwheels. His walking stick was flying through the air behind him. “Stupid,” thought Agathe. “Silly. Why would a man in a
bath chair need a stick? I mean, if you’re wheeled about all the time, what’s the point of a stick? I wonder how the cat is. What if he’s peed in the bed—or worse? That would be a nice surprise for Stopak.”

And then she thought, “First damp patch in that bed for a long while,” but pretended that she hadn’t because that would be a coarse and disgusting thing to say.

Palazz Kinema. New programme every Thursday.

Double Feature and Weekly Newsreel.

Telephone: Dot 2727

“Well, that’s businesslike enough at any rate. Tells you all you need to know. I haven’t been to the pictures for ages. Maybe …”

“I don’t think that’s very nice. I wouldn’t want some nice African woman, sitting on a tram in Ethiopia, wondering if ‘Dot bleach’ could get her toilet as white as me. I wouldn’t like that one bit. Do they have trams in Ethiopia? Do they have toilets? Oh, dear.”

The conductor was swinging on his pole like an acrobat, dashing the length of the back platform and leaping and catching the pole and swinging round it back on to the platform. Agathe ignored him as violently and aggressively as it was possible to ignore anybody. “Of course,” she thought, “the chirpy chatter failed so now behaving like a monkey is supposed to inflame me.”

“Too sweet. I remember I tried it once on the ferry. I felt sick. Might have been the ferry but I don’t think I could do it again. In fact, just looking at that sign is making me feel ill.” She glanced away quickly.

The last sign in the row was printed in white letters on a red background. Very straightforward. No slogans. No gimmicks. It said:

ST. WALPURNIA’S HOME FOR CHILDREN.

HAVE YOU CONSIDERED ADOPTION?

“No!” thought Agathe. “Yes. No. No!”

The conductor rang his bell. “This is Castle Street. Castle Street next stop.”

Agathe jumped off the tram and ran down the street, just as she had that morning, clipping over the pavement while the cathedral clock tower whirred and spun above her. The first bell of ten o’clock was already chiming when she reached The Golden Angel and the place was almost in darkness. Heavy vellum blinds had been drawn over the windows and the last of them was rolling down over the front door, tugged into place by a dark artichoke of a fist. Agathe rapped on the glass with a gloved knuckle. The blind halted. The artichoke fist uncurled a single finger that jabbed insistently to the left, back up Castle Street. Then the blind continued rolling down and the lights behind it clicked off.

Agathe was at a loss. She knocked again on the glazed door. Nothing happened. She waited. Nothing happened.

“Oh, come on,” she said, “I wasn’t late! Well, hardly late. Not late at all. I wasn’t. I was right on time.” She rapped on the glass again. Nothing happened. “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Agathe pouted deliciously. She gave up. She turned and began to walk away home but, just two shop fronts up the street, there was Mamma Cesare, standing in an open doorway.

She said, “You took your time. We said ten o’clock.”

Agathe could only gape at her like a flounder and say, “But … but … I’ve been waiting down the street for the past ten minutes.”

“Well, that was very foolish, wasn’t it? Didn’t you see me pointing?”

“But I had no idea what you were pointing at.”

“You do now,” said Mamma Cesare. “Come in quick.”

She bent to pull Agathe up the step and urge her through the open half of a split front door and into a square vestibule, floored with tiny black and white chequerboard tiles.

The door closed with a forbidding click. Mamma Cesare spun an iron bar into place to secure it. “Now we are all nice and private,” she said. With the two women in it, Mamma Cesare, tiny, brown and hunched, and Agathe, tall, buxom and ample, the little room was full to bursting. “On, out, come on,” Mamma Cesare said, fanning her tiny hands as if Agathe was a stampede to be hurried up two more terrazzo steps and on through the peeling, half-glazed swing doors. “This way. This way. Follow me,” she said but the passageway was dark and Agathe walked slowly, placing each dainty toe on the gritty crunching floor.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Oh, girl, stop fussing. Look.” Mamma Cesare gave an ill-natured shove at a door on her right, invisible in the dark but known to her, and it swung open on The Golden Angel, lit by the lamps of Castle Street, tables all in place, chairs piled up with their legs in the air, awaiting the furious mop.

“See? It’s the shop. We are coming by the side way is all. Happy? You need to be more trusting. No. What am I saying? You are a woman. Trust nobody. Especially do not trust yourself.”

The door swung shut again, leaving them in the darkened corridor, rendered still darker by the light that had just been shut out. “Here are four steps,” said Mamma Cesare.

Agathe heard her flat-footed shuffle and followed, one hand against the wall at her side, kicking each step with the point of her toe to be sure of where it was. And then there was a soft click, the sound of a handle turning and another door opening in the dark. Mamma Cesare’s hand closed round her wrist and pulled her into the room. The door closed, the room filled with light and Mamma
Cesare leapt to embrace her, as eager as a puppy. “Welcome, welcome. Thanksyou for coming. Thanksyou. I am so very pleased to see you.”

It was a strange room, eight sided but far from octagonal, just a space left over when the rest of the building went up around it. The walls were hung in old-fashioned French paper, printed with garlands of roses linked together by pink ribbons on a cream-coloured ground that had faded to buff. “Stopak wouldn’t like that,” Agathe said to herself. “Hard to match up all those ribbons. A lot of waste, especially in a room like this. Too many corners.”

The place was old but clean and neat. There were two windows but Agathe couldn’t imagine where they looked out on. Not on Castle Street, surely. Perhaps on some hidden courtyard.

There were pictures on the walls: the one of me combing my beard that every respectable Dot woman keeps in view of her bed; one of a gaudy fishing boat plunging through the sort of storm that would have sent the toughest battleship hurrying to port; one of ballerinas practising—but the viewer was supposed to understand that these ballerinas were of the poor but honest variety, the type who did not accept gentleman callers, who strove constantly for their art but couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill and consequently danced on in the dark. And there was also, on the same wall as the image of me but somewhat lower down and a little to the left, a picture of St. Anthony, looking unhappy as a lot of devils tugged at his clothes and hair but sure of happiness just round the corner once he’d shaken them off—which he was about to do any minute, one felt sure.

There was a huge, dark, mirror-fronted wardrobe, so large it skimmed the ceiling, dripping with carved fruit that cut across a corner of the room and filled two walls, a brass-framed double bed covered by a home-made quilt which trailed the floor on both sides and a dressing table with a tilted mirror blocking a cupboard door. Agathe saw herself reflected endlessly between the wardrobe and the dressing table as Mamma Cesare waltzed her round the room in welcome.

“I am so pleased you are come. All day, I was wondering. Here. Sit.” Mamma Cesare gave her a gentle push and Agathe plumped down on to the squeaking bed. “No chairs!” Mamma Cesare said.

She drew herself up to her full height, hands on hips, leaning back, looking at Agathe the way farmers look at fatstock in the show ring. It made Agathe nervous. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Take your coat off,” said Mamma Cesare. “I will make us some tea.”

“Not coffee? You make wonderful coffee.”

“That’s for my job. For you, for a visitor, I make tea.”

Mamma Cesare opened the wardrobe. There was a deep drawer at the bottom and it slid out with an easy sigh. She reached inside and brought out a black Japanese tray with a brown china pot, a tiny copper kettle on a stand, a spirit lamp, a box of matches, two fine china cups nestling together on a rattling layer of saucers, another saucer with a lemon and a knife and a tin box with a hinged lid covered in painted flags and golden images of swords and spears and, at the centre, the portrait of a magnificently bearded man in a red shirt.

Mamma Cesare picked up the empty kettle, excused herself—“Moment, please.”—and bustled out of the room.

And that left Agathe to do what anyone would do in her place. She bounced on the bed once or twice, enjoying its extravagant squeaks, briefly battled her urge to snoop and then, because life is short and time is precious, gave in to it. Agathe was not the sort of woman to open drawers or look in cupboards but it is an accepted rule in polite company that what’s on show on a dressing table is, most definitely, on show.

The mirror swung loose in its wooden stand, tilting slightly downwards and looking at the battery of pots and potions on the dressing table. There was nothing remarkable—the usual sort of lily-of-the-valley-scented Christmas presents you would expect for a lady of a certain age, a china dish with hairpins and some clumsy jewellery in it and a tiny photograph in a silver frame. When Agathe picked it up, she felt the velvet backing rub softly against her hand.
Red. Worn thin as if the picture had been handled often. Agathe imagined it—the little brown woman sitting before the mirror every morning, every evening, picking up the picture and kissing it. Was that what happened? Agathe looked again at the hidden velvet and fitted fingers against the worn pile. It could only mean that. A sacred thing. A relic. She looked at the picture in the frame. There was a tall young man, stick-thin, stallion-black hair slicked back over his skull, a moustache so thin and sculpted it must have been the result of fifteen minutes of breathless work with a razor or fifteen seconds with an eyebrow pencil. His cheeks were cadaverous. His eyes were coals. They spoke of ancestry reaching back through shadowed olive groves to Phoenician temples. He wore a heavy three-piece suit. The cloth looked bulletproof and there was a watch chain looping from the pocket of his waistcoat. He had one hand hooked through it by the thumb—a casual gesture when the rest of his body was poker-stiff and plumb-line straight. His free hand lay on the shoulder of the tiny woman in the chair in front of him—not so much a gesture of reassurance and connection as a policeman’s grip, holding her there, forcing her down, keeping her in that chair whether she wanted it or not.