The Good Mayor Read Free

work. The food Agathe made for him dried in the oven or disappeared, like cinders, into the rubbish bin by the sink. But she loved him. She knew she could save him so she waited every night in the kitchen until he came home—whenever he came home—and mouthed her way through spoiled, parched meals with him. He ate everything without a word as if he was shovelling coke into a furnace. Once she even tried to trick him with soup, then cherry pie, then lamb chops but he ate it all in silence, just as he would have done if she had piled everything into one big basin and dumped it on the table in front of him.

    The next evening, to make up for it, Agathe hurried home with a brace of pheasant. In the kitchen, she trimmed off their breasts and wrapped the meat in thick slices of dry, oak-smoked bacon. While it was roasting she sliced carrots and boiled potatoes and laid the table. It was ready when Stopak arrived and he ate it as if it was porridge.

    Agathe looked at him in disgust and disbelief, pushing her fingers through her thick black hair, almost tearing it out with frustration. “For Christ’s sake, Stopak!” she screamed. “Say ‘That was nice’ or something.”

    “That was nice,” said Stopak and he took the evening paper from the pocket of the jacket hung over his chair, flapped it open and began to read.

    Agathe was heartbroken but she wasn’t ready to give up. She was a woman and she understood a man’s appetites. Above all, she understood Stopak’s.

    The next day, as soon as the first peal of bells from the cathedral announced her lunch hour, Agathe left her desk and went into the mayor’s empty office. She wrapped a scarf round her head, turned to face the coat of arms hanging on the wall and murmured a hurried prayer. “Good Walpurnia, you gave yourself to be ravished by the Huns for the sake of the women of Dot. Well, I’m a woman of Dot and I want a Hun for my husband tonight. A Hun! It won’t save all the women of Dot but it might save one man. Help me. Please.” Then she dipped a polite curtsey that showed off her pretty legs and hurried out the door.

    Agathe clipped down the Town Hall’s marble stairs in her high heels and trotted over White Bridge to Braun’s department store where she squandered a purseful of notes on several, almost invisible, items of underwear. “It’s all so expensive,” she gasped, “and it’s hardly even there.”

    The elderly shop assistant smiled. “That’s because it’s made by fairies—woven from the cotton they find in the tops of aspirin bottles on the night of the full moon. Hans Christian Andersen wrote a story about it and some genius developed an entire mathematical formula to explain why the price of knickers rises as the size of knickers falls. Do you want them?”

    “Yes, I’ll have them.”

    “You’ll freeze to death. Listen, for the price, I’ll throw in a nice thick undershirt. Wear it.” She wrapped everything carefully in layers of pink tissue and sprinkled broken lavender heads between the sheets and tied it all in ribbons. Then she put the whole thing in a shiny red cardboard box, with “Braun’s” written on it in gold, and tied up with a yellow raffia cord.

    It dangled hopefully from Agathe’s little finger as she hurried back to work and it sat in her in-tray all afternoon. When the suncame through the office window and warmed it, wafts of lavender began to drift round the room. The scent of it thrilled her.

    Agathe spent the rest of the day glancing from her work to the little red box and from the box to the clock above the door to Mayor Krovic’s office. She was tingling. Her stomach was fluttering. She went to mark up another entry in the mayor’s diary but her hand trembled so much that the pen left an ugly blot on the page. Coffee. Time for coffee. She must have some coffee.

    As she stood by the machine watching the coffee splutch, splutch, splutch into the glass lid, Agathe danced from foot to foot, singing a