In Braun’s department store, waitresses in crisp black uniforms would be collecting stacks of saucers and tidying away the coffee pots and brushing crumbs of choux pastry off the tablecloths with white horsehair brushes. Dot was thinking about lunch and Tibo had had enough of a holiday. He turned back along the Ampersand, heading for City Square again and, as he walked between the elm trees, he found himself, from time to time, patting his jacket pocket, just to be sure that the small rectangular stiffness was still there and, from time to time, between pats, he looked backwards at the pavement behind, as if he feared some helpful citizen might suddenly touch him on the shoulder and say, “Mayor Krovic, did you drop these?”
Nobody did. When Tibo arrived at the Town Hall, the cards were still in his pocket. They were still in his pocket when he bounded up the green marble staircase to his office, still there when he went in and still there when, for the first time since he sacked Nowak, the City Treasurer, for goosing three girls in the typing pool, he closed the door to Mrs. Stopak’s room. Good Mayor Krovic took the cards out of his pocket. Without opening the bag he put them in his desk drawer and locked them away.
The cup of coffee which Agathe had brought him that morning was still on its saucer quivering under a skin of milk. Tibo moved it to one side and slid the paper out of his leather-framed blotter. He turned it over. The underside was clean and bare. He pushed it into place. He smoothed it down. He made sure his inkwell and his pen set and his desk calendar were all nicely squared up and standing to attention. He leaned back in his chair. Everything was right. Neat. Nothing odd or out of place. Good.
Tibo Krovic stood up and opened the door to Agathe’s room again. She looked up from her typewriter and smiled. She had that same look, with her hair piled high and the soft tendrils that curled over her neck, that same look in her eyes that said, “You at last. I’ve been waiting here for ages. Come in and shut the door.”
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“Yes, thanks. Fine.”
“Sure?”
“Yes. Just the coffee you gave me. I forgot to drink it. I’ll have to go and pour it out.”
Tibo retreated back into his office and emerged a moment later with the coffee cup.
“I can do that,” said Agathe.
“No, it’s fine. Don’t bother.” And he made his way carefully down the corridor towards the marble security of the Gents, where he rinsed out his cup, squeaked away the tidemark ring of milk with his thumb under a running tap and took calming gulps of bracing, bleach-soaked air. Old Peter Stavo was nothing if not thorough.
Tibo’s hands were wet. He pushed them through his hair and tugged his waistcoat down flat. In the mirror, he saw the Mayor of Dot again. The Mayor of Dot is not the sort of person to purchase questionable postcards. It was the Mayor of Dot who walked back along the corridor past the picture of Mayor Skolvig’s last stand and the boards with the golden names of all his predecessors but it was Tibo Krovic who walked past Mrs. Stopak’s desk and saw her and smelled her perfume and thought about those postcards and wondered. He hurried into his room and sat down.
“Do you want anything else? More coffee?” Agathe called. “Only I’m planning on going for lunch soon.”
Tibo was about to tell her not to bother when he looked up and found her there, standing on the other side of his desk. “No. I’m fine, thanks. Honestly. Thanks.”
“So how was your tour of inspection?”
“It was fine. Fine too.”
“Spot anything that needs done? Something to get to work on?”
“Couple of things. Small things. Nothing too much to worry about. Maybe a little job for the City Engineer and I might have a word with the Director of Arts and Culture about staffing. We can talk about it later.”
“All right,” said Agathe. “After lunch.”
“Yes.” Tibo hesitated. “Do you have plans? I suppose you’ll be meeting Stopak.”
“No. I went mad and treated myself to a new lunch box and I made some nice sandwiches and I’m going to enjoy them in the square, by the fountain. Lots of the girls do it.”
“Yes, I’ve seen them,” said Tibo.
They had run out of things to say. So, instead of saying, “For God’s sake, Agathe, let’s just get out of here, run down to the ferry and sail away to Dash and get a room in a hotel and spend all night there drinking champagne and making love until we’re sick and not come home until morning!,” Tibo said nothing at all.
“Right, then,” said Agathe. “I’ll let you get on.”
“Yes. Right. Enjoy your lunch.” And Tibo burrowed amongst his empty in-tray until she had gone. He waited, listening. He went to the door that linked their rooms. She had definitely gone. He looked round the corner of the door towards her desk. She was not there.
Tibo walked out of the office, off the thick blue municipal carpet and into the cold, hard terrazzo corridor that led to the back stairs. If he went down and past Peter Stavo’s little glass box, he could reach the square. He went up, past the Planning Department, past the City Engineer and the Town Clerk, past Licensing and Entertainments, up three floors until the stairs grew small and narrow and ran out against a blank door.
Tibo took a bunch of keys from his pocket and flicked through it. He opened the door and stepped into a small white room. Dust from the rotting plaster covered the floor. There were ladders and buckets stacked against the walls, nameless shapes draped in grey sheets and four wooden steps that led up to another tiny door. Tibo climbed again and walked out into the sky. He was surrounded by blue, like my statue standing alone on the topmost crag of the cathedral, wrapped in blue from the sky above his head to the dark smudge on the horizon that might be the ferry coming home. Blue.
He gazed down into the square, down amongst the pigeons and the shoppers and the Town Hall clerks heading to the pie shop, looking for Agathe, the shape of her, the walk of her. And there she was, sitting down on the edge of the fountain, leaning back, letting the sunshine fall on her face as she turned it up to the sky, her handbag and her lunch box safely tucked away under her feet.
Good Mayor Krovic looked at her, at her blue dress, her blue enamel lunch box, the blue of the wide-open sky over Dot reflected in the sparkling water of the fountain and all of them outshone by the cornflower blue of her eyes which he pretended he could see shining from the other side of the square and, suddenly, he found himself saying “cerulean.” Tibo was like that. It happened sometimes. For no reason that he could tell, beautiful words would form themselves in his mind. “Sirocco”—that was one—and “caryatid”—that was another. Cerulean, sirocco, caryatid. And then, on other days, he would find himself struggling to remember things. “What’s the word for a pillar carved in female form?” and “caryatid” would stay out of reach, just beyond his recall until he began to wonder, “Am I getting old? Am I losing my marbles?”
Lately, he had started finding thick, bristly tree trunks sprouting amongst his eyebrows. Tibo was not a noticeably vain man but he admitted to himself that he was having trouble keeping them under control and, the other night, he thought he might bleed to death after a less than successful attempt to shave away unwelcome hairs that had sprouted, wolf-like, from his ears. “Old. I am getting old,” he sighed.
But at moments like this, moments when he looked at Agathe Stopak for as long as he wanted, when he was able to drink her in, Tibo didn’t think of growing old.
A wind came in from Dash and curled the town flag around him. Tibo caught one corner in his fist and kissed it. He was still looking at Agathe when he let it go.
EFORE LONG, THE CATHEDRAL BELLS BEGAN to chime again. The clerks and the shop girls and Agathe started drifting back from lunch. When she reached the office, Good Mayor Krovic was already sitting at his desk, just where she had left him. The newspaper folded open at the half-done crossword, the empty coffee cup and the piles of biscuit crumbs—they all told a story.
“Mayor Krovic, you should eat better,” Agathe sai
d and she swept the crumbs into a cupped hand.
“I’ll have something proper tonight.”
“Just so long as you do. You want to do those letters now?”
She went to her desk for her notebook, came back, sat in the green chair opposite Tibo’s desk and copied down his letter to the City Engineer and another to the Director of Arts and Culture.
“Do you think we need men to open the doors of the museum for visitors?” Tibo asked her.
“Is that all they do?”
“I think it might be.”
“Then I’m not sure,” said Agathe. “What are we paying them?”
“I don’t know that either. That’s why I want to talk to the Director.”
“Well,” Agathe was hesitant, “I wouldn’t want to see anybody lose their job but, on the other hand, as a ratepayer …”
“Yes, that’s what I thought.”
“One more question,” said Agathe, “then I’ll decide. These door-openers—do they have them at the museum in Umlaut?”
“A vital question that goes to the heart of the matter as usual,” said Tibo. “I’ll be sure to ask the Director.”
The afternoon passed slowly in clock ticks and typewriter taps and coffee cups. The Evening Dottian arrived and Tibo was pleased to see he had been pushed off the front page by a fire in Arnolfini’s liquorice factory. Nobody hurt, production back to normal by tomorrow. The morning paper still lay folded on his desk, one clue of the crossword blaring its empty triumph to the room.
“My granny always told me you shouldn’t look out the window in the morning,” Agathe said.
“Because you might need something to do in the afternoon. Yes, thank you, Mrs. Stopak, I’ve always enjoyed that joke.”
“Well, now you’ve got something to do. It’s nearly five o’clock. The wedding, remember?”
“Yes, I remember. The ferry girl. What’s her name again?”
“Kate.”
As Tibo busied himself, putting on his jacket, straightening his tie, Agathe picked up his paper from the desk and looked at it for a moment. She said, “Twenty-four down. It’s ‘impi’—a Zulu regiment is an ‘impi.’ African troop says I am circular ratio. I’m pi. See? Impi.”
“What?”
“Impi.”
Tibo could only shake his head. “I sweated for hours over that. How do you do it?”
“I’m brilliant,” she said.
“Yes, Mrs. Stopak, you are brilliant. A tribute to the schools of Dot. Kate?”
“Kate.”
“And?”
“Simon. She’s the redhead in the dress that’s a little too tight for her. He’s the spotty boy wondering how he got into this mess. All written down on the forms as usual.”
“Kate and Simon. Kate and Simon. Kate and Simon. Right, show them in.”
“On my way,” she said and she left the room with that easy, hip-swinging stroll that amazed Tibo every bit as much as her crossword abilities.
A moment later, Agathe returned, herding the wedding party. Tibo had taken the wooden lectern from its cupboard in the corner and now he stood behind it under the arms of Dot, under my smiling image, smiling himself to welcome them. But they were glum.
Tibo looked at poor, fat red-haired Kate and the only word that came to mind was “unfortunate.” An unfortunate dress, an unfortunate chin, unfortunate billiard-table legs and an unfortunate shade of ginger. Unfortunate. She walked behind the boy, Simon, pushing him along, driving him, unwilling, to make his declaration before the mayor. His face was a blaze of acne, a Biblical plague of pus-y boils—the sort of thing we saintly types would have condemned as a showy display of excessive zeal—and he wore a green suit which had certainly not been made for him.
Good Mayor Krovic came out from behind the lectern to shake their hands—his famous double-handed hand shake, the one where he gripped with his regulation, firm, dry grip and then wrapped his left hand over the top, just to emphasise the sincere depths of his genuine welcome. “Simon,” he said warmly. “Kate.”
They mouthed something at him.
“Are you alone?” Tibo asked.
They looked at each other. They looked back at him.
“Is there nobody else here?” Tibo tried again.
The boy said, “There was a lady who showed us in.”
“Yes, Mrs. Stopak—my secretary. But didn’t you bring a friend? How about your parents?”
Simon looked at his shoes or as much of them as peeked out from his gigantic trouser cuffs. “My dad wouldn’t come,” he said. “Says I’m crackers. Won’t have anything to do with it.”
“And my mum’s working,” said Kate.
Tibo looked at them. Kids. They were just kids. Children. He had no business marrying children. Certainly no business marrying children whose parents didn’t care if they were married or not—didn’t care enough to see it done.
“I can’t marry you,” he said.
“Yes, you can,” the boy said. “We need to.”
“You need to. Do you want to?”
They looked at each other, the spotty boy and the unfortunate ginger girl.
“We need to,” they said together.
And Tibo realised with a wrench that he couldn’t prevent it. He had no right to prevent it. They were just another couple of Dottians he could not protect, not even from themselves. But then, he thought, maybe he liked them better for that. Maybe they were better people—more like the sort of people he wanted for his town because of that. Ordinary, ugly people in bad suits who “had” to get married. Maybe that was what a town like Dot needed—a sense of shame as well as a sense of pride. One without the other would be meaningless. One without the other would be dangerous.
“I can’t marry you without witnesses,” he said and he called Agathe into the room. “Mrs. Stopak, these two young people would like you and Peter Stavo to witness their marriage. Do you think you could find Peter and ask him to come in?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll take Kate to help me look.” Agathe held out her hand and gave a flick of her head. There was a smile in the gesture and, perhaps, something like a wink. Kate went to her. Simon and Good Tibo Krovic were left alone standing face to face across the lectern. Tibo cleared his throat. Simon smiled wanly.
Tibo decided to return to his chair and relax. “Maybe we should sit down,” he said. “They could be a while.”
“I’ll just stand, thanks,” said Simon.
So Tibo sat at his desk, looking at the boy’s back. He had chosen to sit and it would be silly and awkward now to go back and stand. Simon had chosen to stand. He couldn’t change his mind and sit. They were stuck there, facing the same direction, feigning fascination with me, spread-eagled like a bearded butterfly pinned to a shield. It did not aid conversation but Mayor Krovic had a perfect view of the back of Simon’s neck, pink and angry where the barber’s razor had passed that morning. The stumps of three pimples formed a row of bloodied volcanoes along his collar.
There was nothing to say. Tibo fussed over the evening paper for a bit. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit?” he offered.
“No, I’ll just stand.” The boy half-turned his head to speak. The movement sparked an eruption on his neck. A spot of blood rubbed along his collar.
“Fair enough,” said Tibo.
And, eventually, after an age, Agathe returned. She had Peter Stavo with her, ordered out of his brown overalls, looking respectable and smart and she had worked a small miracle with Kate. The boy turned to look at her and his ravaged face split into a smile. Somehow, in the time they were away, Agathe had taken Kate and turned her into a bride. She had changed her hair, tied a silk scarf at her throat, done something with the little store of make-up she always carried in her handbag and Kate was holding in her hands a bouquet of blue flowers. Tibo recognised them. They came from the silver vase which stood in constant tribute in front of the picture of Mayor Skolvig’s last stand. “Why not?” thought Tibo. This is at least as courageous
as anything Skolvig did.
Peter Stavo came forward and stood at Simon’s shoulder. They shook hands. “All the best,” said Peter and Agathe took her place alongside Kate, smiling.
They were all smiling, Tibo realised. Agathe had taken this small, shabby, shamed thing and made it happy. He stood at the lectern and read the words and, when it came to the time for Kate and Simon to hold hands, Agathe took the little bunch of flowers away and stood at one side, holding them, looking down on them.
Tibo had read the words so many times before and now it seemed as if he had never heard them until that moment. Everything a wedding service in a church could provide, they lacked. There was no poetry and no grandeur and no emotion. It was a simple bit of bureaucracy, an official stamp like a dog licence or a hawker’s permit but suddenly, today, Tibo found it strangely thrilling. He read the bland formula aloud for Simon to say, haltingly, after him and, as he read the words, he imagined that he was saying them for Agathe, to Agathe, in his own right.
There she was, in her blue dress, looking modestly into the heart of a borrowed blue posy as he promised himself to her and her only forever and he felt his own foolishness, he felt the foolishness of it all—that the same stupid sense of shame and convention and conformity which had forced those two kids together kept him apart from a woman like Agathe.
When he said, “You may kiss the bride,” there were tears on Tibo’s cheeks. Agathe looked up and saw them there and she gave a little sob too.
“You softie!” she mouthed and turned away to dab her eyes. They had fooled each other.
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