The Good Mayor: A Novel Read online

  Use

  POLISH

  AND YOUR SHOES WILL GLEAM LIKE AN ETHIOPIAN!

  “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.”

  BORA-BORA COLA

  THE TASTE SENSATION

  THAT’S AS FRESH AS THE OCEAN

  “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. S
he 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.

  “That’s my husband,” Mamma Cesare said, closing the door with a heel. “That’s Pappa. My Cesare. On our wedding day. We went straight from the mayor’s office and we had our picture taken. Made everybody wait. So grand we were.”

  She put the kettle on its stand and a little water slopped on to the tray before she lit the wick of the spirit lamp. A ghost of blue flame danced in a lazy circle, sighed, burned steadily.

  The little woman hopped on to the bed. Her feet waved well clear of the floor. She held out her hand to take the picture and gestured to Agathe to sit beside her while the kettle boiled.

  “My Cesare,” she kissed the picture, “such a man he was. Aiyy!” Mamma Cesare bounced on the complaining bed. “Hear that? Squeak! Squeak! Squeak! Twenty-eight years we were married and we wore this bed out.” She bounced around a little more. “Not that I’m complaining. Such a life we had. Such a life you should have. This was a man. This was a real man!”

  Mamma Cesare looked at the picture for a long moment and kissed it again and then she turned to Agathe at her side. “I know what you think. You are looking at me and you are seeing this tiny little old lady. Such an old lady. What does this old lady know of squeaking beds? This old lady,” she clutched the picture close to her chest, “is knowing plenty about squeaking beds and, better than that, she is knowing plenty about love. There is love and there is beds. Love is good and beds is, is, is …beds is fantastico! But, when you are getting love and beds together in the one place,” she slapped a hand down on Agathe’s thigh, “this is the best. This is the good God spitting on his fingers and rubbing on the dirty windows where the angels forgets to clean and he’s saying, ‘Look in here. See what’s waiting. See what it is I am doing for you!’”

  “I haven’t had that for a long time,” said Agathe.

  “Me too,” said Mamma Cesare, “but I remember.”

  “And I forget.”

  “I know. This is why I am worrying so much for you. Look through the window with the wrong man and what you see is not so nice.”

  The little copper kettle began to splutch on its tray and Mamma Cesare jumped down from the bed to deal with it. She took tea from the painted tin, added water, stirred it and waited, stooping over the pot.

  “Why did you speak to me this morning?” asked Agathe. “How do you know so much about me?”

  “I am strega from a long line of strega. It’s not so hard. You see a man who is starving to death and you know he wants bread. He doesn’t have to ask. You see just by looking. Anybody looks at you, they can see you are dying of hunger.”

  “But my husband can’t see it.”

  Mamma Cesare poured the tea. “I think maybe he sees fine. I think maybe he is a very hungry man, a man too frightened to share what he has with you, a man frightened to starve to death so he lets you starve alone. This is a very bad thing. Here,” Mamma Cesare passed her a trembling cup and saucer, “drink this, every drop and say nothing. Not one word. Instead, listen.”

  Agathe untwined her knotted fingers and took the tea. Mamma Cesare settled herself on the squeaking bed beside her. It was like sitting next to Granny when the wind rattled down the chimney and the stories began, “Once upon a time …” Agathe sipped her tea. It was hot. A slice of lemon brushed her lip.

  Mamma Cesare said, “A long, long time ago, in the old country, there was a war.”

  Agathe was about to ask “What war?” but Mamma Cesare quietened her with an eyebrow. “I told you to say nothing. And it doesn’t matter what war. For people like us, it never matters what war. Generals and kings and presidents, they have different wars but, for us little people, there is only one war. All the same, I hope you never learn this. So, a long, long time ago in the old country, there was a war. But we were little people living high up in the mountains and far away. We did not care for their war. It is not touching us. Maybe, one day, we hear the guns like thunder from the hills, maybe, one night, we see their fires but everything is far away. Then, one day, there is shooting on our road and, at night, when it is over, there is a red soldier lying under a bush with no head where his head should be.”

  The room was quiet except for the sound of teacups on saucers. After a moment, Mamma Cesare said, “Then our village was itself again until, one night, there was fighting in our fields. Men were shouting. They hammered on our shutters and on our doors. The dogs bark. We do not open the door. In the morning, when it is quiet, there is a blue soldier sitting under a tree in my father’s orchard with no heart where his heart should be. So we chase away the pigs and take him to the graveyard and bury him. That day, all the men meet on the steps of the church to decide what to do. This one says that we should keep out of the war, that it’s none of our business. That one says the war is on our road and in our orchards and banging on our shutters at night—it’s too late to keep out. This one says that our village has always been blue and the young men should go and fight for blue but that one says that blue is finished and red is going to win so we should join red. It went on all day. It got hot. I went home to make soup.”

  Mamma Cesare leaned across to check on Agathe’s tea. “You finish? Say nothing.”

  Agathe tilted the cup to let her see. There was still a little left.

  “Take the lemon out. Put it in your saucer. Drink every drop. So I make soup. And, the next day, when I go to the well, they tell me Cesare has gone to fight.”

  Agathe drained her cup in a gulp and placed it decisively in her saucer. “Which side did he join? Was he blue or red?”

  “You finished?” Mamma Cesare investigated the cup. She was satisfied. “Nobody knows what side he joined. Nobody can decide who is best—blue or red. Nobody can decide who is worst. We hate them all but they made us fight. If we are red, then the blues will come and burn the village. If we are blue, then the reds will come. So the old men say we send our boys to both sides and tell both sides it is them we like. And they leave the village, the boys, and they toss a coin and they pick a side but they never tell anybody else because one side is going to win and one side is going to lose and both sides are go
ing to die but somebody is going to come back and nobody is going to get the blame for killing nobody else. Not never!”

  “You must have been terrified,” said Agathe.

  “I thought my heart was breaking,” said Mamma Cesare, “and the worst thing is I can’t say nothing because Cesare is not mine. Cesare is going to marry my best friend.”

  “Your best friend!” Agathe gasped with the thrill of it. This was as good as anything you could see at the Palazz Kinema on George Street—no, it was better! This was a true story of love and war. She imagined herself in the stalls with a bag of sweets on her knee, stirring trumpet chords playing, a drum roll, looking up, seeing that flickering rectangle of blue light beaming out from the projectionist’s box, the cigarette smoke rising and curling through it, titles rolling up the screen: “The Red and the Blue. Starring …” Who should it be? Yes, “Horace Dukas as Cesare and introducing [a whisper of violins] Agathe Stopak as Mamma.” That would need work. We have to find a better name. And a best friend—we need a best friend. And Cesare needs a best friend too and they have to leave the village together in the dead of night and then, on some moonlit road, they draw lots and—the horror—they end up on opposite sides and they try to make a deal with some other village boys so they can be on the same side but it’s no good.

  And here’s Horace Dukas standing under a full moon, streaming with clouds, and he says, “Boys, this will never work. We can’t pick sides here like it was a game of football in the village square. We can’t leave the wheezy fat boy standing on his own waiting to see if he lives or dies. So you don’t want to be fighting your brothers or your cousins. So what? Who would you choose to kill? Nobody wants to kill, nobody wants to die, so let’s just take the dice as they fall and ride our luck. You are all my brothers and I wouldn’t harm one of you to save the village but each of us would gladly die for our homes, our farms and our mothers. If we have to die, isn’t it better that a friend should do it? At least then we don’t die alone!”