The Good Mayor: A Novel

by Andrew Nicoll

“That would be lovely, Mr. Mayor,” she said.

  “Right. And I’m sorry about the other thing. About before. The friend thing. Sorry.”

  “I know,” she said. “All forgotten.” And she gave the postcard another little adjustment with the tip of her finger.

  Agathe was already sitting in the window seat of The Golden Angel by the time Tibo came hurrying up Castle Street just after one. He saw her smiling at him through the glass and he pushed through the lunchtime customers to join her.

  Agathe lifted her handbag from the seat it had been protecting on the opposite side of the table. “I ordered for you,” she said. “I’m getting daring in my old age.”

  “Good,” said Tibo. “What are we having?”

  “Same as usual—whatever Mamma Cesare decides is good today.”

  They laughed and Tibo said, “I brought you a present.” He put the brown paper parcel down on the table and slid it towards her. “It’s a book.”

  Agathe gave him a look that said, “I guessed that,” and picked up the parcel.

  There was a way about Agathe Stopak, a way she had of doing things that made people look at her. She didn’t mean to do it—in fact she had no idea she was doing it and, if she had, it would never have captured people the way it did. But, sometimes, she would move or look or just be and she would move or look or be more perfectly, more beautifully than anybody else had ever thought of doing any of those things before. She did it then, lifting the parcel to her mouth as if to kiss the knots that held it closed, gripping the string in her teeth and tugging it open. She brushed her fingertips over the worn gold letters on the front of the book. “Homer.” It was half a question.

  “You said you wanted one for your house in Dalmatia. When you win the lottery.”

  “I’m not much of a reader, Tibo.”

  “That doesn’t matter—you’re not the one doing the reading, remember. You’ll be lying in a cool bath, drinking red wine while I feed you olives.”

  She smiled and raised the book to her nose and drank in its scent. “It smells like the beach—the beach on a sunny day. Thank you. It’s lovely. I will keep it safe until you want to read it to me.”

  “Now’s a good time,” said Tibo.

  “Not quite now—not with our pasta on its way. But I’ve got something to show you.”

  “My turn for presents,” Tibo said hopefully.

  “Sorry. I haven’t got you anything, but you can share this if you like.” Agathe opened her bag and brought out a notebook. It bulged, the pages splayed fatly as if there were a thick bookmark between each one. “Look,” she said, “this is my house on the coast of Dalmatia. I carry it round with me all the time. This is where you can read me Homer.”

  Agathe flicked through the pages and showed him the pictures she had torn out of magazines and saved there. “Look, I want big flowerpots like this standing by the front door with lavender and rosemary growing in them and thyme down among the cobbles.”

  Tibo thought of the coal dust between the cobbles on the road through the docks and the whores and the men in the shadows.

  She said, “I used to keep paper scraps like these when I was a girl and swap them with my friends in the playground. You could buy them from the newsagent. I used to like the ones with pictures of fat angels, leaning their elbows on clouds and looking grumpy—like Mr. Guillaume.”

  Tibo opened the book and pointed. “Tell me about this,” he said but, just then, the waiter arrived and put down two huge bowls of pasta.

  “Penne picante,” he announced and he waved his magician’s passes with the pepper shaker and the Parmesan shaver and hurried off.

  “That’s how I want the fireplace,” said Agathe, “big enough to sit in, out of the draughts in the wintertime. When I move to Dalmatia, I’m never going to be cold again.”

  “I won’t allow it,” said Tibo.

  Agathe almost purred at that. She wriggled a little in her seat and said, “I’ll bet” with a wicked smile and then Tibo felt stupid and awkward because she had out-brazened him. He had tried to be louche and dangerous and man-of-the-worldly and she had seen through him in a couple of words.

  Tibo looked into his plate. “Eat up,” he said and then, after a bit, “It’s very good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s always good here but I could do just as well.”

  “You like to cook?”

  “And I’m very good at it. Not that anybody notices these days.” She stabbed at her pasta.

  “Tell me what you like to make.”

  Agathe was enthused and smiling again. “Granny taught me,” she said. “I make man food.”

  Tibo groaned inwardly. “Yes, you do,” he thought. “You’d make perfect man food. You are man food.” But he had learned enough to say nothing and he just nodded an encouragement.

  “Men like something meaty, something they can get their teeth into.”

  Tibo almost whimpered.

  “Are you laughing at me?” she asked. “Food’s a serious business. It’s how you show somebody that you love them. Well,” she looked into her plate again, “one of the ways. Finding just the right ingredients, choosing a nice bit of meat and cooking it right and serving it up nicely on a nice table. That’s a nice thing to do for somebody. It shows you care. It’s kind.”

  Tibo knew that you can be cruel to someone without doing anything at all, without hitting them or shouting at them but simply by denying them the chance to be kind. He put his hand on Agathe’s. “What would you cook me?”

  She thought for a moment and said, “I would cook you fish soup—no, beef soup. Beef, and I’d cook you my rabbit in cream and mustard sauce and I’d make you a big creamy rice pudding with plenty of nutmeg and loads of fat raisins.”

  “I’ll get fat as a raisin myself.”

  “Not if I had my way,” Agathe thought. “I’d keep you fit. I’d work it off you, Tibo Krovic, you lovely, lovely man.” But what she said was, “Well, you could do with building up and, anyway, you’ve got a long way to go before you catch up with Mr. Guillaume.”

  “Quite a long way,” said Tibo, “but I don’t think I’ll bother with pudding. I’m sure Mamma Cesare gives us bigger portions to let us know that we’re favoured customers. But you have something if you like.”

  “No, I’m fine,” said Agathe. “I’ll make you a coffee at the office.”

  Mamma Cesare came out from behind the polished coffee organ when Tibo went to pay, smiling and nodding enthusiastically and assuring them how nice it was to see them both and how nice they were to come in and how nice they were looking. “All verra nice. Always verra, verra nice.” She beckoned confidentially to Agathe who bowed close as Tibo waited politely out of earshot by the door. “You come see me soon,” she said. “Come tonight.”

  “I can’t come tonight,” Agathe said. It was a lie. She could easily have gone. After all, she had no reason to stay at home but there was something about Mamma Cesare’s insistence that made her reluctant, made her want to rebel.

  “Come soon, then,” said Mamma Cesare. “Please come soon.”

  It made Agathe feel sad and ashamed. “I will. Soon,” she said.

  Tibo and Agathe walked arm in arm down Castle Street through the crowds of shoppers and the office workers trudging back to their desks after sandwiches by the Ampersand or a pie in the Dot Arms.

  “I hope you like your book,” said Tibo.

  “I love my book.”

  That word. It jangled over the noise of the street like the sound of coins falling from a pocket or a baby crying. It was just a word, spoken on a busy street but it deserved more coming after it than “my book.” It deserved less coming after it. One word, not two. “I love my book,” Agathe said again. It was the only way to drown out the noise of it.

  “I love your book too.”

  She looked at him, wondering, waiting for him to say something else.

  “You know,” he said, “your book—the one with your house in it.”

 
“Oh,” she said.

  “I think it’s lovely—your book.”

  “Yes, I like it.” She sounded disappointed somehow. “I can carry my whole house around with me and my lottery tickets inside. I take them out and look at them. Warm my hands on them. It’s a little glow of hope folded up in my handbag.”

  If Tibo felt the sadness of that, he showed no sign. He said, “You offered to let me share it. I’d like to, if I may. I’d like to find things that you like and help to build your house for you—until you win the lottery and the real one comes along. If you’d like that.”

  “I’d like that,” she said and they were back in City Square.

  IFE WAS LUNCHES AFTER THAT. THEY spent their mornings looking forward to lunchtime and, all afternoon, they laughed about what they had laughed about at the table. They went for lunch and laughed and talked about everything. They talked about books and Tibo was an expert on books. He had read everything and he shared what he knew with her. They talked about food and Agathe was an expert on food. Whatever they ate at The Golden Angel, she could make better at home. Soon she was filling her blue enamel lunch box with good things for Tibo to heat up in his own kitchen. No more herring and potatoes for him. They talked about life and sadness and loneliness and each found that the other was an expert. But each was expert in a different field. Tibo knew the loneliness of being alone, Agathe knew the loneliness of being with another.

  Tibo brought her gifts—stupid, silly things that he thought would please her—books that he thought she would like, boxes of Turkish delight—she held the firm pink pieces between two fingers and enveloped them with her lips for his entertainment—treasures from the dusty back rooms of the junk shops of Dot, meaningless nothings that meant everything. Almost every day, Tibo had some little present for her.

  Every month he bought her another strip of lottery tickets and, every month, she failed to win a penny. But that didn’t matter. They sat together in The Golden Angel at lunchtime and made plans anyway. They pondered over maps of the coast of Dalmatia from an old Baedeker which Tibo had dug out of a box in a bookshop on Walpurnia Street. They squandered endless napkins on drawing and redrawing plans of the house which Agathe would build with her lottery winnings. Here would be the bathroom, no, here, opening on to a loggia with a view down to the bay and the cliffs in the background. The kitchen should be so and the sitting room here with a fireplace big enough to sit in, in case of a hard winter, and a store for the olives and a library for the Homer. Sometimes Tibo arrived at The Golden Angel with pictures torn from catalogues and they would discuss how to furnish the house. It grew in their minds into a low range of white buildings under red clay tiles with broad, shaded eaves over a verandah facing south.

  Inside there were huge comfortable leather sofas, imported at great expense from the gentlemen’s clubs of London where they had been seasoned for a century with good cigar smoke and brandy spills. Bright Afghan rugs littered the floors. Double doors of etched glass in gilded rococo frames—stolen from The Golden Angel—led from the sitting room directly into a bedroom furnished with a sleigh bed, where the walls were hung with cabbage rose paper and layers of muslin, swagged over the window, softened the glare of the summer sun. Lingering over creamy ravioli, they chose white cotton bedlinen and they selected a range of simple napery for the table, but they rejected crystal. Agathe picked up one of the thick pressed-glass tumblers from the cafe table. The sun shone through it with a greenish tinge. After twenty years of use and washing, the tumbler was scratched and roughened like a bit of bottle-glass ground smooth by the waves. “This is what the sea will be like in Dalmatia,” she said. “We should have glasses like this. We don’t need fancy glasses. We need glasses that will bounce if we drop them—only bigger, to hold more wine. I intend to be in the bath for a long, long time.”

  The thought of Agathe in the bath, water coiling and folding over her hips, her belly, her breasts, gave Tibo a delicious shiver. That afternoon he stopped at the chemist’s and bought her a box of clear scented soap.

  In the evenings in Aleksander Street, Agathe cooked things, wonderful things, man food, and she brought them to work in the morning in her lunch box or in pots or dishes which she balanced on her knees as she rode on the tram. And, when she gave them to Tibo, she would say, “Eat this,” or “Good soup,” or “Eat this. It’s a pie. I worry that you don’t look after yourself.”

  In the evenings, when Agathe was standing at her stove cooking and thinking about him, Tibo was sitting in his kitchen, eating and thinking about her. In the evenings, as he sat down to eat the food she had prepared, Tibo would ask himself, “I wonder if she remembers what she said about food and loving somebody.” And he would open the Evening Dottian.

  In the evenings, when she ladled the stew she had made into the clean dish which Tibo had returned to her that morning, Agathe would ask herself, “I wonder if he remembers what I said about food and loving somebody.” And she put the leftovers on a plate for Stopak.

  In a strange way, it meant they were together all the time, at work or at home and, all the time, they were thinking, “It’s going to happen.”

  When they walked up Castle Street together to The Golden Angel, they walked arm in arm thinking, “Today, it’s going to happen.”

  When they hurried back through chilly City Square to an empty office, they thought, “Now, it’s going to happen.”

  Agathe, standing alone by her sink, washing the pots, said to herself every night, “It’s going to happen tomorrow.”

  Tibo in his kitchen, wrapping Agathe’s newly washed pie dish in a tea towel, ready to hand back to her, would whisper to himself, “I know it will happen tomorrow.”

  All through the long weekends, when there were no lunches at The Golden Angel, when they lingered long in the fish market or gazed endlessly in the windows of Braun’s or wandered pointlessly in Copernicus Park, just on the off chance, you understand, that maybe, purely by chance, they might meet, then each of them said over and over, “It’s going to happen.”

  When Tibo brought her jars of olives—which she did not like—when he brought her that old torn Baedeker with its maps of Dalmatia, when he sat with her in The Golden Angel, making plans for her house, when he brought her windows and curtains and ornaments to put in her book, when he walked into the room, when their hands touched on the tablecloth, Agathe knew, “It is going to happen.”

  When Agathe came to work smelling of the special soap he had bought for her, when she opened the box of Turkish delight he gave her and she held a piece between finger and thumb and folded her lips round it and took it into her mouth and looked at him from under eyelids that drooped with pleasure and said nothing at all, when a waft of “Tahiti” drifted through the office, when she walked into the room, when their hands touched on the tablecloth, Tibo knew, “It’s going to happen.”

  And Tibo, in his empty house, where the bell at the end of the path rang softly in the autumn gales and Agathe, lying in a cold bed alone and touching herself with hands she pretended were not her own, both of them said, “It’s going to happen. Now.”

  But neither of them, not Good Mayor Krovic or Mrs. Agathe Stopak, ever said, “Today I will!” Not for more than two months. Not in the fag end of September, not in October, not in November when the decorations went up in Braun’s and the mechanical birds were set twittering in its near-legendary Christmas tree, not until December when Agathe began to lose patience.

  To tell the truth, Mrs. Stopak was getting annoyed—annoyed and even a bit angry. It probably had something to do with the time of year. It was cold and Agathe always hated to be cold and she hated clumping to work in galoshes instead of the pretty shoes she liked to wear—shoes that would show off her legs—and, of course, December is the end of the year. That upset her. It would mean another year with Stopak, another year with nobody in that bed but Achilles and no baby and no love.

  As she walked flat-footed, in cold rubber shoes down Castle Street that morning, Aga
the had worked up quite a fury. When she awoke in the flat in Aleksander Street, she had noticed just a small and bitter cinder nestled near her heart but it was alive and glowing and she blew on it all the way into town on the tram. By the time she got to the Castle Street stop, she had added a few torn scraps of “What’s wrong with him?” and some thoroughly dried “Is it me?” to the heap and fanned it with a little “Can’t he see?” Just before she climbed the green marble staircase in the Town Hall, it started to take light and, when she sat down at her desk, the whole heap was blazing merrily.

  Agathe sat down at her desk and threw off her galoshes, letting them thump to the floor across the room and stand there pigeon-toed against the wall, as if an invisible schoolgirl had been sent to the naughty corner as a punishment. And, when Tibo came in and said, “Good morning” in the same cheery way that he always did, she said nothing. Tibo made it all the way into his office before he realised, then he stopped halfway through the door, leaned backwards and asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” she said icily.

  He came out of his office and stood by her desk. “Sure?”

  “I am absolutely fine. What could be wrong? I’m fine.”

  “Right,” said Tibo and he went back into his office and sat down at his desk.

  Agathe arrived a few minutes later. She dumped a pile of letters on the blotter in front of him and, with her free hand, she presented a china bowl. “Fish pie,” she said.

  Tibo took it with a smile. “Thank you. You spoil me, Agathe.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “Are we going for lunch today?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course. Why ‘of course’? Were you going to ask me?” And she stamped out of the office.

  Tibo got up from his desk with a sigh and followed her out.

  She was already sitting down in her chair, thumping a stack of papers into line on her desk.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You are quite right. I have no business taking you for granted.”

  Agathe “hmmphed” at that.