The Good Mayor: A Novel

by Andrew Nicoll

  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.

  Human beings have an almost limitless capacity to delude themselves—a tenacious ability to deny the blindingly obvious, a heartbreakingly lovely talent for believing in something rather nicer than whatever it is that is staring them, baldly, in the face, right the way up to the clanging doors of “the shower block.” And what a great blessing that is. It’s what makes us write poems. It’s what makes us sing songs and paint pictures and build cathedrals. It’s the reason that Doric columns exist when a tree trunk would do the job just as well. It is a glorious, beautiful, agonising gift and it makes us human.

  HEN AGATHE LEFT THE FLAT IN Canal Street that morning—already over an hour late for work—and waddled, stiff-legged for fear of falling, through the snow to the Foundry Street tram stop, she knew she loved Hektor. She knew it. She knew it the way she knew her name and her shoe size, the way she could point to Dot on the map or bake a cherry cake without looking at the recipe or weighing things out. It was just something she knew, something pointless to deny.

  And, when she sat on the tram on the way to City Square, the warm, churning glow of love that she felt rising in her chest and boiling up through her smile was every bit as real as the waves of shame and trepidation that now and then washed over her too. Tibo. What could she say to Tibo?

  Tibo, for his part, had already decided what he was going to say to Agathe. Tibo was going to say, “Co-lour-ful.” He would say it and keep saying it—“Co-lour-ful, co-lour-ful, co-lour-ful …” slowly and distinctly, looking her right in the face. That would let her see that he got it. He had finally understood what it was she was trying to tell him and he wanted to say it back to her. “Co-lour-ful! Co-lour-ful! Co-lour-ful!” over and over again, every day of his life, over and over for the rest of his life. No—for the rest of her life, that was the important thing. He was determined that Agathe should know that she was loved, and loved more and loved better than any other woman in Dot—any woman in the world—and know it every day of her life.

  “I love you, Mrs. Agathe Stopak,” he shouted. “Colourful! I love you colourful.” Nobody heard when he said those things because, when he said them, Tibo was standing in the kitchen of his house all alone but he was determined that, soon, the whole of Dot would know it. He had known for ages, of course, for weeks since that very first day when her lunch box fell in the fountain but only now was he free to admit it.

  It would be difficult. He recognised that. There would be a scandal. Tongues would wag and fingers too but Tibo was ready for that and, when the man in the bathroom mirror asked him, “What about the mayor’s job? Are you ready to give that up too?” Tibo had answered, honestly, “Yes, even that.”

  “What will you do? How will you live? How will you feed her?”

  “I’ll find something.”

  “Not in Dot,” said the mirror mayor. “Who would hire you? What can you do? You have risen too high, Mr. Uppity Krovic. No one will catch you when you fall.”

  “Then we will move. Move to Umlaut.”

  “It’ll be even worse there. You’d be a laughing stock. Frontpage news in Umlaut. Don’t kid yourself. You’d be lucky to get a job playing the piccolo in a pissoir and, if you did, the city authorities would bring parties of schoolchildren along on educational outings just so they could hold you up as a dreadful example.”

/>   “I’ll move to Dash and open up a bait stall on the quayside.”

  “Not exactly the coast of Dalmatia, is it?” said the mirror mayor.

  “She doesn’t care about the coast of Dalmatia. She’d be just as happy with a damp flat in Canal Street with me. She told me that. She loves me and I love her. I love Agathe Stopak.”

  Tibo was still saying that when he walked out of the house a few minutes later. “I love you, Agathe. I love YOU, Agathe,” trying it out for the sound of it, for the newness of it in his mouth until, when he got to the end of the path and walked out of the slouching gate on to the street, he raised his head from the slip-slidy path and the sky was over him like a blessing—white-bright and pearl-pink in the east, still dove-grey and rat-black behind him in the west. “Nacreous,” said Tibo and he turned left, up the hill towards the tram stop.

  At the top of the street, Tibo was pleased to see that the depot night staff had spent their time profitably in fixing snowploughs to Dot’s trams. Frozen snow lay in rubbled heaps in the middle of the road but here, and all across Dot, the rails were clear, trams glided smoothly and efficiently, people went to work as usual.

  Tibo sat on the top deck again, just as he had on the way home the night before but this time it was a pleasure, not a penance. Wrapped in his scarf with his coat collar buttoned up, the chill wind off the islands meant nothing to Tibo. He looked down from the tram, smiling, swaying through Dot, bright, clean, snow-shiny Dot, the town where Agathe Stopak lived, nodding like a maharajah atop a stately, gilded elephant.

  “Howdah,” he whispered to himself.

  That morning, for the first time in a very long time, Mamma Cesare and the staff of The Golden Angel were surprised, and not a little disappointed, to see Mayor Tibo Krovic striding right past their door without coming in for his usual Viennese coffee with plenty of figs. Instead, he walked a little further down Castle Street and crossed to the florist’s shop that Rikard Margolis had run for thirty years, since his mother died under an unfortunate avalanche of tulip bulbs. They still speak of that day in the dockyards of Dot. In exchange for every bloom in the shop—except those urgently required for that day’s funeral orders—Tibo wrote a cheque for an impossible sum and gave directions for everything, baskets and bouquets and posies, to be delivered directly to his office as soon as possible.

  The flowers arrived in relays, carried down snowy Castle Street in procession by three hurrying shop girls and Mr. Margolis himself. They trotted over White Bridge like dairymaids, a bucket in each hand and each bucket bursting with flowers except for the two runs that the florist made alone when he came, shivering, into the Town Hall in his shirtsleeves with his coat folded gently around rare stems of orchids. “They are very delicate,” he said, cupping his hands round the cup of coffee Mayor Krovic offered.

  And then, standing in the mayor’s office with almost his entire stock filling the room, Mr. Margolis sent his three shop girls back to work with orders to get busy on the wreaths for the milkman Nevic, whose funeral was that afternoon, and he began to build a bower of flowers, just as Mayor Krovic ordered, around Agathe’s desk. Before long, there were mountains of blooms covering every surface, jostling round her typewriter, camouflaging the coffee pot, marching in every direction across the floor, standing to attention like a guard of honour to guide her to her seat. And Tibo, poor, stupid Tibo, was so caught up in the thrill of it, rushing from one side of the room to another, handing individual blooms to Mr. Margolis as he snapped off leaves and twisted little bits of soft wire, so entranced by the whole thing, so lost in the sheer delight of the fairy grotto he was helping to create, so eager to share Agathe’s happiness when she saw it, so desperate to present it to her “colourfully,” that he never even noticed she was late for work.

  In fact, Mr. Margolis was just walking down the green marble staircase, slipping his coat on with an exhausted sigh and shuffling towards City Square with four tin buckets in each hand when Agathe arrived at the Town Hall. She held the door open for him as he passed, unfeasibly overburdened with buckets, red in the face and grumbling as he went, but Agathe barely even noticed he was there. And, when he’d gone and she stood inside, just over the threshold, it took the door bumping shut against her bottom on its automatic closer to nudge her forward.

  Poor Agathe. She took a deep breath, bit her lip, set her shoulders and climbed those stairs just the way Constanz O’Keefe had done on her way to the guillotine in the final reel of Passion in Paris but, at the top, there was no jeering mob baying for her blood, no brutal executioner waiting to bind her hands and force her into the dreadful embrace of the guillotine with a sneer on his lips and ice in his heart. There was something much worse. There was the perfume of a thousand flowers—hothouse roses skilfully forced into bloom in December and chrysanthemums and freesias and big-eyed daisies and dozens and dozens of others, flowers she could not name, flowers she had never seen before, flowers piled every-where till they filled the room and clotted the air with their scent. And, in the middle of it all, standing alone on her chair, in a simple blue glass bud vase, was a perfect white rose. She bent to pick it up and a plain card, tied on with stiff gold thread, rattled against the glass. It said, “Colourful. Tibo” and there were three kisses.

  Agathe sat down in her seat with a bump so the castors squeaked and the chair rolled back a little. She sat there, her handbag hooked over her arm, one hand holding the rose in its vase and she jammed her fist in her mouth and sobbed.

  Behind her, the door to the landing closed quietly and Tibo came out from his hiding place there, out from that dead triangle of space where he had been waiting to surprise her and walked quickly to her and put his hands on her shoulders and bent and kissed the top of her head and said, “Shhh, shhh. It’s all right now—everything will be all right now. Colourful, colourful, colourful. I understand now. No tears. No more tears. Shhh. Shhh. Oh, Agathe. Oh, my darling Agathe. Colourful, colourful, colourful.”

  Agathe took her knuckles out of her mouth and let her handbag drop to the floor and put the rose in its vase carefully on the desk. It looked very prim and chaste alongside a stem of violent red lilies draped there, along the carriage of her typewriter. She reached across herself and, without turning round, without lifting her head to be kissed, without saying anything, without making any sound at all beyond a few little sniffs, she patted Tibo’s hand where it lay on her shoulder. Just kind and gentle pats, a gesture of quiet and comfort and sympathy.

  “Colourful,” said Tibo. “Colourful.”

  Agathe said nothing. She rubbed the back of his hand softly.

  “Colourful, Agathe. Colourful.”

  She said nothing.

  “Agathe? Colourful?” He expected her to reply. Hadn’t he cracked the code? Didn’t he deserve the reward? Still holding her shoulders, he spun her round in her chair to face him. “Don’t cry now. You don’t have to cry any more. You can be happy forever now—as happy as you’ve made me.” He took her hand and kissed it. “Do you like the flowers? They’re all for you. I thought they would be,” he paused for half a second to let quotation marks form in the air, “colourful.”

  Agathe gave a little “snitch” and she felt her eyes brim with tears again.

  “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” he said. “It’s all right. I know now. Colourful. I know what it means.”

  “Yes, Tibo, I know what it means too.”

  “Colourful.”

  She put her hand up and laid her fingers across his lips to quiet him but he kissed her away like an idiot and he said, “I love you.”

  There’s really only one thing to say when somebody says that and there really isn’t too long to say it in. It doesn’t take too long before a beguiling shyness or a thrilled dumbfoundedness or a dramatic pause lengthens. And lengthens. Into an embarrassed silence.

  Agathe had to look away, shaking her head slowly and closing her eyes and not opening them again until she was staring down at the floor. “There’s something I think yo
u should know,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Yes. You have to.”

  “No. Look, it’s just silly. There’s nothing I need to know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You should.”

  “No. Look. Look at these flowers.” He trailed his hand pointlessly over a spray of orchids on her desk, suddenly fascinated with them.

  She said nothing.

  Tibo became engrossed in a pot of daisies. He moved to the other side of her desk and buried his head amongst foliage. “So, you and Stopak,” he said, “you’re going to give it another go. That’s nice. That’s … Well, I’m glad for you. Really.”

  “No, Tibo,” she said. “I’m leaving Stopak. I’ve left. I’m leaving. There’s somebody else.”

  “Since yesterday? But yesterday you said … Yesterday you told me … Yesterday? There’s somebody else.”

  “It’s not like that. I’ve known him for ages.”

  “And all this time! All these lunches!” Now there was anger in his voice as well as hurt and Agathe resented that. He was entitled to the hurt but she grudged his anger.

  “All what time?” she sneered. “All those lunches? Do you want your money back?” She opened up her handbag, emptied it over the flowers that clogged her desk and shook everything out and waved her purse at him like a weapon. “Is it the money that bothers you?”

  “Agathe.”

  “Is it?”

  “Agathe. No.”

  She let her arms fall and slumped into her chair, defeated. “In all this time … All this time … And after all these lunches … What? You never even kissed me.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Today was the first time you kissed me. I was yours for the taking. I wanted you so bad and you could’ve had me and I wouldn’t have said a word to anybody if there was just a chance I could have had one little bit of you to call my own but you never even kissed me until today.”