Evangelista's Fan

by Rose Tremain

  As the day passed and darkness filled the cracks in the shutters, Mercedes began to feel tired. She moved the anatomy book aside and laid her head on the table beside the pastry board. She put her hand inside her grey shirt and squeezed and massaged her nipple, and her head filled with dreams of herself as a girl, standing in the square, smelling the sea and smelling the mimosa blossom, and she fell asleep.

  She thought someone was playing a drum. She thought there was a march coming up the street.

  But it was a knocking on her door.

  She raised her head from the table. Her cheek was burning hot from lying directly under the light bulb. She had no idea whether it was night-time yet. She remembered the heart, almost finished, in front of her. She thought the knocking on her door could be Honorine coming to talk to her again and tell her she couldn’t go on living the way she was.

  She didn’t want Honorine to see the heart. She got up and draped a clean tea towel over it, as though it were a newly baked cake. All around the pastry board were crumbs of wax and used matches. Mercedes tried to sweep them into her hand and throw them in the sink. She felt dizzy after her sleep on the table. She staggered about like a drunk. She knew she’d been having beautiful dreams.

  When she opened her door, she saw a man standing there. He wore a beige mackintosh and a yellow scarf. Underneath the mackintosh, his body looked bulky. He wore round glasses. He said: ‘Mercedes?’

  She put a hand up to her red burning cheek. She blinked at him. She moved to close the door in his face, but he anticipated this and put out a hand, trying to keep the door open.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘That’s the easy thing to do.’

  ‘Go away,’ said Mercedes.

  ‘Yes. OK. I will, I promise. But first let me in. Please. Just for ten minutes.’

  Mercedes thought: if I didn’t feel so dizzy, I’d be stronger. I’d be able to push him out. But all she did was hold onto the door and stare at him. Louis Cabrini. Wearing glasses. His curly hair getting sparse. His belly fat.

  He came into her kitchen. The book of human anatomy was still open on the table, next to the covered heart.

  He looked all around the small, badly lit room. From his mackintosh pocket, he took out a bottle of red wine and held it out to her. ‘I thought we could drink some of this.’

  Mercedes didn’t take the bottle. ‘I don’t want you here,’ she said. ‘Why did you come back to Leclos?’

  ‘To die,’ he said. ‘Now, come on. Drink a glass of wine with me. One glass.’

  She turned away from him. She fetched two glasses and put them on the table. She closed the anatomy book.

  ‘Corkscrew?’ he asked.

  She went to her dresser drawer and took it out. It was an old-fashioned thing. She hardly ever drank wine any more, except at Honorine’s. Louis put the wine on the table. ‘May I take my coat off?’ he said.

  Under the smart mackintosh, he was wearing comfortable clothes, baggy brown trousers, a black sweater. Mercedes laid the mackintosh and the yellow scarf over the back of a chair. ‘You don’t look as if you’re dying,’ she said, ‘you’ve got quite fat.’

  He laughed. Mercedes remembered this laugh by her side in her father’s little vegetable garden. She had been hoeing onions. Louis had laughed and laughed at something she’d said about the onions.

  ‘I’m being melodramatic,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to die tomorrow. I mean that my life in Paris is over. I’m in Leclos now till I peg out! I mean that this is all I’ve got left to do. The rest is finished.’

  ‘Everything finishes,’ said Mercedes.

  ‘Well,’ said Louis, ‘I wouldn’t say that. Leclos is just the same, here on its hill. Still the same cobbles and smelly gutters. Still the same view of the sea.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Mercedes, ‘nothing lasts here in Leclos. Everything folds or moves away.’

  ‘But not the place itself. Or you. And here we both are. Still alive.’

  ‘If you can call it living.’

  ‘Yes, it’s living. And you’ve baked a cake, I see. Baking is being alive. Now here. Have a sip of wine. Let me drink a toast to you.’

  She needed the wine to calm her, to get her brain thinking properly again. So she drank. She recognised at once that Louis had brought her expensive wine. She offered him a chair and they both sat down at the table. Under the harsh light, Mercedes could see that Louis’ face looked creased and sallow.

  ‘Honorine told me you’d been hiding from me.’

  ‘I don’t want you here in Leclos.’

  ‘That saddens me. But perhaps you’ll change your mind in time?’

  ‘No. Why should I?’

  ‘Because you’ll get used to my being here. I’ll become part of the place, like furniture, or like poor old Vida up at the church with her broken foot.’

  ‘You’ve been in the church? I’ve never seen you in there.’

  ‘Of course I’ve been in. It was partly the church that brought me back. I’ve been selfish with my money for most of my life, but I thought if I came back to Leclos I would start a fund to repair that poor old church.’

  ‘The church doesn’t need you.’

  ‘Well, it needs someone. You can smell the damp in the stone . . .’

  ‘It needs me! I’m the one who’s instituted the idea of economy. No one thought of it before. They simply let everything go to waste. I’m the one who understood about the candles. It didn’t take a philosopher. It’s simple once you see it.’

  ‘What’s simple?’

  ‘I can’t go into it now. Not to you. It’s simple and yet not. And with you I was never good at explaining things.’

  ‘Try,’ said Louis.

  ‘No,’ said Mercedes.

  They were silent. Mercedes drank her wine. She thought, this is the most beautiful wine I’ve ever tasted. She wanted to pour herself another glass, but she resisted.

  ‘I’d like you to leave now,’ she said.

  Louis smiled. Only in his smile and in his laughter did Mercedes recognise the young man whose wife she should have been. ‘I’ve only just arrived, Mercedes, and there’s so much we could talk about . . .’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’

  The smile vanished. ‘Show me some kindness,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had the happy life you perhaps imagined. I made a little money, that’s all. That’s all I have to show. The only future I can contemplate is here, so I was hoping—’

  ‘Don’t stay in Leclos. Go somewhere else. Anywhere . . .’

  ‘I heard about the fire.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The fire at the laundry. But I think it’s going to be all right.’

  ‘Of course it’s not going to be all right. You don’t understand how life is in Leclos any more. You just walk back and walk in, when no one invited you . . .’

  ‘The church “invited” me. But also Madame Picaud. She wrote and asked me what could be done when the laundry burned down. I told her I would try to help.’

  ‘There’s no insurance.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How can you help, then?’

  ‘I told you, all I have left is a little money. One of my investments will be a new laundry.’

  Mercedes said nothing. After a while, Louis stood up. ‘I’ll go now,’ he said, ‘but three things brought me back, you know. St Vida, the laundry and you. I want your forgiveness. I would like us to be friends.’

  ‘I can’t forgive you,’ said Mercedes. ‘I never will.’

  ‘You may. In time. You may surprise yourself. Remember your name, Mercedes: Mary of the Mercies.’

  Mercedes drank the rest of the wine.

  She sat very still at her table, raising the glass to her lips and sipping and sipping until it was all gone. She found herself admiring her old sticks of furniture and the shadows in the room that moved as if to music.

  She got unsteadily to her feet. She had no idea what time it could be. She heard a dog bark.

&n
bsp; She got out her candle moulds and set them in a line. She cut some lengths of wick. Then she put Louis Cabrini’s waxen heart into the rounded saucepan and melted it down and turned it back into votive candles.

  Two of Them

  We used to be a family of three: my mother, Jane, my father, Hugh, and me, Lewis. We lived in a house in Wiltshire with a view of the downs. At the back of the house was an old grey orchard.

  Then, we became a family of two-and-three-quarters. I was fourteen when this happened. The quarter we lost was my father’s mind. He had been a divorce solicitor for twenty years. He said to me: ‘Lewis, human life should be symmetrical, but it never is.’ He said: ‘The only hope for the whole bang thing lies in Space.’ He said: ‘I was informed definitively in a dream that on Mars there are no trinities.’

  My mother searched for the missing bit of my father’s mind in peculiar places. She looked for it in cereal packets, in the fridge, in the photographs of houses in Country Life. She became distracted with all this searching. One winter day, she cried into a bag of chestnuts. She said: ‘Lewis, do you know what your father’s doing now?’

  She sent me out to find him. He was on our front lawn, measuring out two circles. When he saw me he said: ‘Capital. You’re good at geometry. Hold this tape.’

  The circles were enormous – thirty feet in diameter. ‘Luckily,’ said my father, ‘this is a damn large lawn.’ He held a mallet. He marked out the circles by driving kindling sticks into the grass. When he’d finished, he said: ‘All right. That’s it. That’s a good start.’

  I was a weekly boarder at school. In the weekdays, I didn’t mention the fact that my father had gone crazy. I tried to keep my mind on mathematics. At night, in the dormitory, I lay very still, not talking. My bed was beside a window. I kept my glasses on in the darkness and looked at the moon.

  My mother wrote to me once a week. Before we’d lost a quarter of one third of our family, she’d only written every second week because my father wrote in the week in between. Now, he refused to write any words anywhere on anything. He said: ‘Words destroy. Enough is enough.’

  My mother’s letters were full of abbreviations and French phrases. I think this was how she’d been taught to express herself in the days when she’d been a debutante and had to write formal notes of acceptance or refusal or thanks. ‘Darling Lewis,’ she’d put, ‘How goes yr maths and alg? Bien, j’espère. Drove yr F. into S’bury yest. Insisted buying tin of white gloss paint and paint gear, inc roller. Pourquoi? On vera bientôt, sans doute. What a b. mess it all is. You my only hope and consol. now.’

  The year was 1955. I wished that everything would go back to how it had been.

  In mathematics, there is nothing that cannot be returned to where it has been.

  I started to have embarrassing dreams about being a baby again – a baby with flawless eyesight, lying in a pram and watching the sky. The bit of sky that I watched was composed of particles of wartime air.

  I didn’t want to be someone’s only hope and consolation. I thought the burden of this would probably make me go blind and I wished I had a sister, someone who could dance for my parents and do mime to their favourite songs.

  When I got home one weekend, there were two painted crosses inside the circles on the lawn. They were white.

  My father had taken some of the pills that were meant to give him back the missing part of his mind and he was asleep in a chair, wearing his gardening hat.

  ‘Look at him!’ said my mother. ‘I simply don’t know what else is to be done.’

  My mother and I went out and stood on the white crosses. I measured them with my feet. ‘They’re landing pads,’ said my mother, ‘for the supposed spaceship from Mars.’

  I said: ‘They’re exactly sixteen by sixteen – half the diameter of the circles.’

  We sat down on them. It was a spring afternoon and the air smelled of blossom and of rain. My mother was smoking a Senior Service. She said: ‘The doctors tell me it might help if we went away.’

  ‘Where to?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know where to. I don’t suppose that matters. Just away somewhere.’

  I said: ‘Do you mean France?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I think he might be worse abroad. Don’t you? And the English are better about this kind of thing; they just look the other way.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  I was thinking of all the weekends I was going to have to spend alone in the empty school. Sometimes, boys were stuck there with nothing to do for two days. A friend of mine called Pevers once told me he’d spent a total of seventeen hours throwing a tennis ball against a wall and catching it.

  ‘What about the sea?’ said my mother. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You mean, in the summer?’

  ‘Yes, darling,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t manage anything like that without you.’

  What I thought next was that it might be better to throw a ball against a wall for seventeen hours than to be by the sea with my father watching the horizon for Martians and my mother reminding me that I was her only hope and consolation.

  I got up and measured the crosses again. I said: ‘They’re absolutely symmetrical. That means he can still do simple calculations.’

  ‘What about Devon or Cornwall?’ said my mother. ‘They get the Gulf Stream there. Something might blow in. One can never tell.’

  My father woke up. The pills he was taking made his legs tremble, so he sat in his chair, calling my name: ‘Lewis! Lewis! Boy!’

  I went in and kissed his cheek, which was one quarter unshaved, as if the razor had a bit of itself missing. He said: ‘Seen the landing sights, old chap?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They’re brilliant.’

  ‘Two,’ he said triumphantly.

  ‘How did you know how big to make them?’

  ‘I didn’t. I’m guessing. I think there’ll be two craft with four fellas in each, making eight. So I doubled this and came up with sixteen. Seems about right. Everything with them is paired, perfectly weighted. No triangles. No discord. No argy-bargy.’

  I waited. I thought my father was going to tell me how the Martians could set about saving the world after they’d landed on our front lawn, but he didn’t.

  ‘What do they eat?’ I asked.

  My father took off his gardening hat and stared at it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I overlooked that.’ And he began to cry.

  ‘It won’t matter,’ I said. ‘We can drive into Salisbury and buy masses of whatever it turns out to be. It’s not as though we’re poor, is it?’

  ‘No,’ he said. He put his hat back on and wiped his eyes with his shirt cuffs.

  My mother found a summer holiday house for us in north Cornwall. It was out on a promontory on a wild hill of gorse. From the front of it, all you could see was the beach and the ocean and the sky, but from the back – the way my bedroom faced – you could see one other house, much larger than ours. It was made of stone, like a castle. It had seven chimneys.

  On our first day, I found a narrow path that led up from our house directly to it. I climbed it. I could hear people laughing in the garden. I thought, if I were a Martian, I would land on this castle roof and not on our lawn in Wiltshire; I would go and join the laughing people; I would say, ‘I see you have a badminton net suspended between two conveniently situated trees.’

  My parents didn’t seem to have noticed this other house. Wherever they were, they behaved as though that spot was the centre of the universe.

  On our first evening, they stood at the French window, looking out at the sunset. I sat on a chair behind them, watching them and hearing the sea far below them. My mother said to my father: ‘Do you like it here, Hugh?’

  My father said: ‘Beach is ideal. Just the place. Better than the bloody lawn.’

  That night, when I was almost asleep, he came into my room and said: ‘I’m counting on you, Lewis. There’s work to be done in the morning.’

  ‘W
hat work?’ I said.

  ‘I’m counting on you,’ he repeated. ‘You’re not going to let me down, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to let anybody down.’

  But then I couldn’t sleep. I tried throwing an imaginary tennis ball against an an imaginary wall until the morning came.

  We made circles in the sand. I was supposed to calculate the exact spot where the sun would go down, as though we were building Stonehenge. My father wanted the sun to set between the two circles.

  My mother sat in a deck chair, wearing a cotton dress and sunglasses with white frames. My father took some of his pills and went wandering back to the house. My mother went with him, carrying the deck chair, and I was left alone with the work of the circles. They had to have sculpted walls, exactly two feet high. All that I had to work with was a child’s spade.

  I went swimming and then I lay down in the first half-made circle and floated into one of my dreams of previous time. I was woken by a sound I recognised: it was the sound of the castle laughter.

  I opened my eyes. Two girls were standing in my circle. They wore identical blue bathing costumes and identical smiles. They had the kind of hair my mother referred to as ‘difficult’ – wild and frizzy. I lay there, staring up at them. They were of identical height.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  One of them said: ‘You’re exhausted. We were watching you. Shall we come and help you?’

  I stood up. My back and arms were coated with sand. I said: ‘That’s very kind of you.’ Neither of them had a spade.

  ‘What’s your name?’ they said in unison.

  I was about to say ‘Lewis’. I took my glasses off and pretended to clean them on my bathing trunks while I thought of a more castle-sounding name. ‘Sebastian,’ I said.