“Today was the first day I knew. I never knew. You never said. It was only today.”
“Oh, Tibo, stop it. Not today. Today is a day too late. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.”
Tibo ducked amongst the foliage again. She saw the top of his head nodding there, appearing through a wall of leaves like a wounded animal, half seen in the jungle. “Can I ask who it is?” he said.
“Tibo, does it matter?”
“Is it a secret?”
“No, not a secret. We’re going to be together. You don’t know him. His name is Hektor. Actually, he’s Stopak’s cousin.”
“You’re not serious!” Tibo hurried round the desk to stand in front of her again. “Agathe, you’re not serious. Not Hektor Stopak? Of course I know him. Do you know the kind of man he is? He’s got a record an inch thick. He’s a waster, a violent criminal.”
“Stop it!” She put her hand up as if she was trying to halt a runaway train. “He’s not like that. I know what he is. He’s not. I know he’s not the tenth part of the man you are but he wanted me when you didn’t. He was there and you weren’t. He’s real and you weren’t and it’s him I love.”
“For God’s sake, Agathe.”
“Tibo, please be happy for me. Please.”
“Has he even got a job?”
“Of course, and a house, and he’s a great, great artist.”
“Good. I’d like to buy his pictures. Where should I go? Where can I get one?”
“You can buy one soon enough. Everybody will want them. I’m going to help him. He’ll be world famous soon.”
“Soon. Any day. Very soon. Just not yet!”
“Tibo, please. Please stop this. Please, Tibo.”
They were tilted towards one another, leaning close, not shouting, speaking cold pain at one another, pleading for the pain to stop, throwing more pain and then, with that last “please,” their bodies seemed to spring apart like classroom magnets, like animals fighting in a forest where fear and pain outweigh adrenaline, when they realise that neither of them will survive this, when they skulk away.
Tibo stood and looked out the window. “A day too late,” he said.
“Please understand,” she said.
“I understand. Believe me, I understand. Agathe, it’s the story of my life. I understand. Who could understand it better? All I have ever wanted was for you to be happy. If this makes you happy then it makes me happy. That’s what love is, Agathe.”
There was very little left to say after that and they sat for a while, crying out to one another in silence, Tibo looking out the window towards City Square, seeing the spot where she sat on the day she dropped her sandwiches in the fountain, looking up to the dome of the cathedral which he was now, more than ever, convinced was empty and hollow in every way, and Agathe looking from her shoes to her hands to the flowers on her desk to Tibo’s sad shoulders and back again to her shoes.
Eventually she said, “Tibo, I need you to believe that I was telling the truth. When I said it yesterday, I was telling the truth. You are the same man I fell in love with, the same wonderful man, the same good, kind, clever man, and I will never stop loving you. I will always, always love you.”
“Oh, for the love of God,” he said. “For the love of God, Agathe, shut up!” And then, walking quickly and carefully in a kind of dance step so he kept his back to her all the way, he managed to reach his office and slam the door.
Now, it may have been because the whole of Dot and everything in it had been poised, on the edge of its seat, for months, shredding at its handkerchief, waiting for Mayor Krovic to say, “I love you,” and waiting to see what would happen when he did, or it may have been because a lump of pigeon guano, two centuries in the making, shaped like a bomb and hard as concrete, had somehow fallen off the roof and into the workings of the clock but, whatever the reason, the bells of the cathedral had missed the last two quarters of the hour. And, whether the tension of the moment had passed and somehow released the frozen workings of the clock or whether the clock’s massive spring had succeeded in crushing the guano to something like talcum powder by the time they arrived, the team of engineers who hurried, gasping, up the clock-tower steps when the carillon failed to sound, found nothing whatever wrong. A few minutes after Mayor Krovic hurried away to hide in his office, the bells of my cathedral struck eleven, right on time and Agathe pushed aside an arrangement of chrysanthemums that was crowding round the coffee pot, retrieved a packet of ginger biscuits and took them down the back stair to Peter Stavo’s glass-fronted booth.
When they had drunk a mug of coffee together and eaten almost the entire packet of biscuits without saying a word, Agathe stood up and said, “Mayor Krovic wants you to take those flowers in his office up to the hospital. Order a taxi. In fact, order two. Order several. There’s a lot of flowers. I’m going home. I’m not feeling so good.”
The glass door rattled in its frame as it shut behind her and Peter ate the last three biscuits alone. “Poor kid,” he said.
EOPLE ARE CREATURES OF HABIT. WE run along in familiar tracks like the trams of Dot, sometimes leaning over a bit on the bends, sometimes screeching a little or sending up a shower of sparks but, for the most part, sticking to the same routine. And, although Agathe had left the rails she had run in for years and years, she was surprised to find that she kept rolling. She didn’t topple over, she didn’t shudder to a halt. No injuries, no fatalities, no damage, just a new route, away from the usual tracks, free of any track at all, in fact.
She was not naturally a poetic person but all those things occurred to her when she got off the tram at Green Bridge, just as she had always done. It was only after she had waited dutifully at the side of the road for the traffic to clear, after she had let the tram pull away safely, that she remembered about Hektor and the two extra stops to Foundry Street. “I don’t live here,” she said and she began to trudge along the snowy pavement, past The Three Crowns and on, towards Canal Street.
She was sad. She couldn’t help it. Not even the glow of new love could change that. Agathe could never have walked away from a scene like that with Tibo and not be sad. She thought of him running away, with his back to her. She thought of him closing his office door—a thing he never did—and she knew why. She knew he had been hiding his tears and the thought of it hurt her. “I can’t go back,” she said. “At least Hektor still has a job and two can live almost as cheaply as one. Cheaper probably, once I get a grip on things. And he won’t be wasting all his money in The Three Crowns any more—especially if he can’t go drinking with Stopak.”
She was still congratulating herself on Hektor’s employment prospects when she turned right into Canal Street and spotted him there, carrying boxes into the flat.
Agathe made a face like a trout and said, “Why aren’t you at work? It’s the middle of the day.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” he said. “Here I am, lugging all your stuff around town and that’s the thanks I get. Didn’t take long, did it?”
“What didn’t take long?”
“For the hot little girlfriend to disappear and the nagging wife to come back.”
“Hektor!” She was outraged. After months of use, she found the words “Tibo Krovic would never have said such a thing” ready to fly from her mouth but she swallowed them back like bile. “Hektor, just tell me why you’re here.”
He picked up a red cardboard suitcase with leather corner bumpers and carried it into the flat. From the darkness inside he yelled back, “Well, it turns out Stopak wasn’t as reasonable as I thought he’d be. Told me to get lost—or words to that effect.”
“What?” she hurried into the flat after him.
“Yeah. I am now, officially, unemployed.”
“No. No. Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing happened. I went round there as usual. I made some coffee. I put him in the picture.”
“What did you say? Oh, God, I should never have let you do this. I should have done it. It was up to me.”
“I wasn’t horrible about it. I’m not an idiot. There’s no reason to rub the guy’s face in it. But there’s not a nice way to do it, is there? What should I say? I told him you spent the night here and you weren’t coming back. He’s not stupid. He didn’t need a diagram.”
“And he was angry?”
“Let’s see, was he angry? Well, he emptied his coffee in my face and punched me in the guts.”
“Oh, no. Oh, Hektor, you didn’t fight!”
“Sorry, kid, he’s a big man. It took me a bit to make him see sense.”
“Is he hurt?” Agathe was having trouble revising her loyalties.
“Hey, it’s me who got the coffee in the face. It’s me who got the punch in the guts.”
She rushed forward and started dabbing his face with pouty kisses. “Yes, yes, I know,” she said. “My poor baby. But he’s such a big strong baby.”
Hektor wasn’t in the mood. He brushed her away with one hand and grabbed her plump arse with the other. “Look, nobody’s hurt. It made a bit of a show for the neighbours …”
“Oh, God!”
“And I’m out of a job but that doesn’t matter. It’ll give me more chance to paint, so it will. And you’ve still got a good job at the Town Hall. That’ll keep us going for a bit …”
“But, Hektor …”
“And, anyway,” he kissed her hard, “I should be saving my energy for seeing to your womanly needs.” Hektor kicked the door closed and dragged her to the bed.
That’s how things are with lovers—at the start at any rate—and, because Hektor made her remember that, he made her forget that it had once been that way with Stopak too. And, when she groaned under him or on him or beside him, when she touched him, when they whispered, when they screamed, she forgot everything else.
She forgot her job and the awful dread of facing Tibo again, she forgot about going in to work every day to keep them both, she forgot about everything except making Hektor a great artist. She would make him great. She would make him famous and she would do anything that needed to be done, sacrifice anything, fill his table and warm his bed, cook for him, work for him, strip for him, pose for him, lie for him, anything that it took because she loved him and that’s how things are with lovers—at the start at any rate.
T WAS DIFFERENT FOR TIBO. HE WENT FROM place to place, from his home to his office, from his bed to his bathroom, the way that the clockwork apostles moved around the cathedral. He had a route to follow, a job to do, actions to perform but he had no idea why. He had no control and he had no direction, he simply did.
Overnight, Tibo’s mind became a numb shriek. He found himself standing on the stairs at four in the morning, unsure whether he had risen unaccountably early or if he had yet to finish climbing the stairs to bed. He stopped eating. What would be the point in eating? Everything tasted like old wood, there could be no joy in it and, anyway, anything that he ate would only be a reminder of other things he had eaten in the past—things that she had made.
With winter deepening, Tibo found himself out of doors more and more. Every day—sometimes twice a day—he walked out to the lighthouse to stand under its sabre beam, letting the storms scour him. Mostly, since the days were so short and there was work still to be done, he found himself there in the dark, the sea roaring invisibly round the jumbled rocks at his feet and clawing its way viciously towards him in mountains of yellow spume where the lighthouse beam passed. But, sometimes, he found himself there in the daytime, fitting his breathing to the turning of the huge lenses he could hear grinding round on their mechanism at the top of the tower or fighting to match his heartbeat to the crash and suck of the waves. Everything became a reminder of Agathe. Everything was a metaphor for her. The lamp of the lighthouse suddenly extinguished or moved a few yards to one side would leave poor mariners helpless or guide them blindly straight to destruction. The Pole Star shifted. Everything that had been true was a lie, everything that had been solid was a phantom. Standing there, for hours at a time, Tibo tore and shredded at himself. The same anger, the same hurt beat through his veins again and again, driven round by his broken heart. “How could she do this to me when she said she loved me? She does love me—she said that again—she cares. So how could she hurt me this way? So she lied. She’s a liar and a whore. But how could I fall for a liar and a whore? What kind of idiot does that make me? If I can’t spot a liar and a whore like that, what good am I? Maybe I’ve stuffed the accounts department with crooks and thieves. If Agathe is a liar and a whore, then nothing is real, nothing makes sense, nothing is certain. So she isn’t. She can’t be. Agathe is a good woman. So how could she do this to me?” On and on, over and over, in time with the angry waves that gasped a tempting invitation at his feet. Tibo stepped back from the edge, walked slowly backwards until he was pressed against the solid bulk of the lighthouse and waited there, in the rain, until the rhythm in his blood subsided.
“I will not,” he said. “I will not. I am Tibo Krovic, the Mayor of Dot. I will not go mad. I will not go mad.” Again and again he said it, louder and louder until he roared down the waves and the gulls rose up in terror and yackled at him and then, with his hair soaked flat on his head and his coat flapping in the wind, he stumbled back along the shingle spit towards the docks and home. “I will not go mad.” He kept repeating it, like a charm against lunacy. It protected him from the women in the shadows along the dock road and they drew back into the deep doorways of the warehouses as he passed. They are used to dealing with the crippled but they avoid madmen. Sometimes the mad hear the voice of God and it never seems to have a good word for whores and, from time to time, the madman has a knife to help him with God’s work. They listened to his muttered promise and let him pass, wondering if they could ever be as certain. “I will not go mad? I will not go mad? Another winter of this and I might.”
His daily walks to the lighthouse taught Tibo to love the gulls. In order not to go mad, he resolved to be like them. The key was not to panic, he decided, to be at home, now, in the place where he found himself, like a gull. If a fisherman of Dot found himself alone and adrift at sea, he would suffer and probably die because he felt himself in the wrong place, but a gull was as happy on land as on sea, as much at home on this bit of sea or that bit. If you have no home, it doesn’t matter where you stay. It doesn’t matter if the waves come in black walls. Just float. Just survive. Be a gull.
At work, where he did not dare to look out the window in case he saw a fountain and where she was, just on the other side of the door, working, smelling beautiful, being Agathe, it was there he began his morning with that insane business of standing just inside the door, listening for the “clump” of Agathe’s galoshes when she came in to work and rushing to fling himself on the carpet, squinting through the crack beneath the door for a glimpse of her plump little toes as they wormed into her shoes. A few seconds of undignified wriggling and then poor, good, mad Tibo would sigh and stand up and brush the carpet fluff from his suit and go and sit down at his desk with his head on the blotter and listen to Agathe Stopak, clip-clip-clipping across the tiled floor of the office next door, putting something in a filing cabinet or brewing coffee or simply being soft and scented and beautiful and on the other side of the door and he would sigh and groan and cry.
He tried to be a gull. He tried to make himself float and be at ease in whatever place he was in. Just float. And then the picture came to him of a seagull waking after a storm, waking far out to sea with no sign of land, flapping, rising from the water and beginning to fly. “I have flown the wrong way,” said Tibo, “deeper into the ocean and now I’ll never get home. All this time, I was flying the wrong way.” He put his head in his hands and he began to weep.
Weeping was something Tibo did a lot. At the lighthouse, at home in the big old house at the end of the blue-tiled path or in his office, alone, with the door closed. He developed a facility for it. He found he could weep the way some people can catnap. With a ten-minute gap in his diar
y between appointments, he could give himself up to grief, let the tears roll down on to his blotter, stop, compose himself and go on with the business of the day. Agathe knew, of course, and it wounded her but there was nothing she could do.
One day, not long after she moved to Canal Street, she tried. She tapped gently on his office door, waited, heard nothing, knocked again and, after a moment, when Tibo said, “Yes. Come in,” in a choked voice, she entered with a folder of mail. Tibo kept his head down, apparently engrossed in some report or other, too busy to look up or acknowledge her, not when she put the folder on his desk or even when she took his hand. He froze. His pen halted mid-line.
Agathe knew she had made a dreadful mistake but she seemed unable to prevent herself from making it worse. It was as if there were two Agathes, one standing by the desk holding Tibo’s unwilling hand, one hanging from the ceiling and looking on in horror as she said, “Tibo, please, I want you to understand. This isn’t about you. You are the same wonderful, lovely man and you always will be and I will always, always love you but I have to do this. I have to. Please, Tibo, try to be happy for me. Try to understand.”
He never moved his gaze from the page in front of him. He left his hand lying in hers like a dead fish. He said, “I understand. I understand perfectly. How many times? How often must I absolve you? How many times do you want me to bleed? All I ever wanted was for you to be happy. And now you’re happy so I’m happy too. I’m happy for you and these …” he swirled angry circles of ink round the pale blobs on his blotter, “these are tears of joy.”
Agathe left. There was nothing more to say and she wanted to hurry away before her tears started falling on the blotter alongside Tibo’s. There was a pigeon dancing on the window ledge of Rents and Commercial, over on the other side of the square and Agathe stared hard at it through the window, gripping the edges of her desk almost as if she were afraid of falling off. Behind her, she heard Tibo close his office door with a click.
The Good Mayor: A Novel Page 24