The Good Mayor Read Online Free PDF Page B

can it mean?” And then she felt suddenly foolish and concentrated very hard on the handbag propped on her prim knees. It didn’t mean anything. It was just what they did. Some birds stretched out their wings and glided endlessly over oceans, some had to flap like clockwork toys to go from branch to branch. What can it mean? Nothing! What does it mean for a grown woman to look for a meaning in that? Some birds fly this way, some birds fly that way, the leaves come on the trees, the leaves fall off the trees, a man wants you, a man stops wanting you, a baby’s born, a baby dies. That’s all there is to it. There is no meaning in it. It doesn’t mean anything.

    Agathe felt her eyes fill and she hurriedly reached into her handbag for a tiny handkerchief and dabbed away the tears with a folded edge before they ruined her make-up.

    The tram conductor clanged his bell. “Castle Street next stop!”

    She stood up, swayed to the back of the tram and stepped off. The Golden Angel was just across the junction. Agathe stopped at the edge of the pavement, waited for the traffic to clear and crossed the road. As the heavy glazed doors of the cafe closed behind her, all the noise of the street disappeared, politely excluded as if by some solicitous major-domo. Inside, the place breathed calm and steam and coffee smells and cinnamon and almonds and peace and welcome. It was a coffee cathedral and, in the heart of it, like a vast organ gleaming under burnished copper domes and wrapped in polished brass pipes, the huge, steaming coffee machine spurted toccatas of flavour.

    Agathe gave a heavy sigh and took off her gloves. All the tables were full but the high stools along the counter were still not taken. Agathe hated sitting there. It wasn’t ladylike. She felt that, perched there, people would look at her. She was right, people would. Men because they couldn’t help it, women because they knew they couldn’t.

    Agathe sat down on the stool at the very end of the counter. It was awkward. She had to hitch her skirt a little higher than shewould have liked. It stretched over her hips a little tighter than she would have liked. People looked. Men noticed the way her stockings wrinkled a little at the heel. Women noticed them noticing.

    At the other end of the bar, the owner, Cesare, was standing like a carved figure. Everything about him was black except for his sparkling white shirt. His hair was brilliantined black. His moustache, pencil thin, was carbon black, his eyes, his suit, his tie, his gleaming shoes that turned up at the toe, all black, and the spotless white cloth that hung over his arm only made everything else all the blacker.

    He moved to take Agathe’s order but a voice came sharply from somewhere in the depths of the coffee machine. “I’ll do this, Cesare.”

    “Yes, Mamma,” he said and he went back to standing very still. Cesare was good at standing very still. He could do it for a long, long time.

    And then, from out of the coffee organ, Mamma Cesare appeared. She was tiny, barely able to see over the counter, but she was formidable—a pocket battleship of a woman. Everything that was black about Cesare was iron grey with her. Hair pulled back in a tight bun the colour and texture of iron, iron-grey wool stockings on bow legs, shoes that should have been black but were scuffed down a few shades from constant wear as she waddled for miles every day between the tables and a dress that had been black when she put it on in the first days of her widowhood. But that was decades and countless yester-washes ago.

    Mamma Cesare rocked her way from hip to hip down the passage behind the counter and stopped in front of Agathe. From down there, on the floorboards she had polished with nearly fifty years of feet, Mamma Cesare looked up at Agathe balanced on her high stool and smiled like a shark. “Voddayavont?”

    “Coffee, please. And a Danish pastry.”

    “Have the coffee. The Danish you don’t