Evangelista's Fan

by Rose Tremain

  ‘I’m Fran,’ said one of them.

  ‘I’m Isabel,’ said the other.

  ‘We’re twins,’ said Fran, ‘as if you hadn’t guessed.’ And they laughed.

  They were taller than me. Their legs were brown. I put my glasses back on, to see whether they had a bust. It was difficult to tell, because their swimming costumes were ruched and lumpy all over.

  ‘We’re fourteen,’ said Fran. ‘We’re actresses and playwrights. What are you, Sebastian?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘nothing yet. I might be a mathematician later on. What are your plays about?’

  ‘You can be in one with us, if you like,’ said Isabel. ‘Do you want to be in one?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘We only do it for fun,’ said Fran. ‘We just do them and forget them.’

  ‘I don’t expect I’ve got time,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get these circles finished.’

  ‘Why?’ said Isabel. ‘What are they for?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘for my father. He’s doing a kind of scientific experiment.’

  ‘We’ve never met any scientists,’ said Isabel. ‘Have we, Fran?’

  ‘We know tons of sculptors, though,’ said Fran. ‘Do you like sculpture?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘We’ll go and get our spades,’ said Isabel, ‘shall we?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s jolly kind.’

  They ran off. Their difficult hair blew crazily about in the breeze. I watched them till my eyesight let them vanish. I felt out of breath – almost faint – as though I’d run with them into the distance and disappeared.

  That night, my mother got drunk on Gin and It. She had never explained to me what ‘It’ was. She expected me to know thousands of things without ever being told them. She said: ‘Listen, Lewis, the tragedy of your father is a tragedy of imagination. N’est-ce pas? You see what I mean, darling? If he’d just concentrated on the Consent Orders and the Decrees and so on, this would never have happened. But he didn’t. He started to imagine the feelings. You see?’

  She was scratching her thigh through her cotton dress. Some of the Gin and It had spilled onto her knee. ‘So, listen,’ she said. ‘In your coming life as a great mathematical person, just stick to your numbers. OK? Promise me? You’re my only hope now, darling, my only one. I’ve told you that, haven’t I? So don’t start. Promise me?’

  ‘Start what?’

  ‘What I’m saying is, stick to your own life. Yours. Just stay inside that. All right? Your mathematical life. Promise?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What does “It” stand for, Mummy?’

  ‘What does what?’

  ‘“It”. What does it stand for?’

  ‘“It”? It’s just a name, sweetheart. A name for a thing. And names can make Mummy so happy, or so, you know . . . the other thing. Like your father, Hugh. Darling Hughie. Mostly the other thing now. All the time. So promise and that’s it. Understood?’

  ‘I promise,’ I said.

  The next day my father came to inspect the circles. Only one was finished. Just beyond the finished one was a sand sculpture of a bird. Fran and Isabel and I had stayed on the beach for hours and hours, creating it. They had made its body and wings and I had made its feet.

  The bird was huge. It had a stone for an eye. My father didn’t notice it. He was admiring the circle. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now the other one. I’ll give you a hand. Because the time’s coming. I can feel it. I’ve been watching the sky.’

  I worked with the child’s spade and my father worked with his hands. The sight of his red hands scooping and moulding the sand made me feel lonely.

  I waited all day for Fran and Isabel to come. At tea-time, it began to rain and I knew they’d be up in the castle, doing a play to pass the time. The rain fell on the bird and speckled it.

  It rained for two days. My parents tried to remember the rules of Ludo. I walked in the rain up the path as far as the castle shrubbery, where I sat and waited. I stared at the droopy badminton net. I counted its holes. And then I walked back down the path and went into the room where my mother and father sat, and closed the door. They’d abandoned the Ludo game. They were just sitting there, waiting for me to return.

  That night, I wrote a note to Isabel and Fran:

  Dear Isabel and Fran,

  When is your next play? I would like to be in it, if you still want me to be.

  Yours sincerely,

  Sebastian

  I set my alarm for four o’clock and delivered the note as the sky got light and the larks in the gorse began singing.

  When the good weather came back, my father and I mended the circle walls beaten down by the rain. My mother watched us from her deckchair, wearing shorts. Her legs looked very pale. Sometimes, she went to sleep behind her glasses.

  My father seemed restless and excited. He said: ‘It’s going to be soon, Lewis. And at night. I’m going to peg down two sheets in each of the circles. I’ve checked the moon. Visibility should be fair.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘I’m as prepared as I can be, thanks to you. Bar the food question. But your mother will cope with that. And there’s always fish. Fish is a universal; it must be. But there’s one other important thing.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got to be there. Your mother thinks this is a lot of drivel, so she won’t come. So I’m counting on you. They want to see two of us. I’m as certain of that as I can be of anything. If there’s only me, they’ll take off again and go back to Mars.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  But I wasn’t really listening to him. My mind was on Isabel and Fran, who had sent me an answer to my note:

  Dear Sebastian,

  The first rehearsal for our next play is going to be in a tent we’ve pitched between our house and yours. Friday evening. Ten o’clock. Bring a glass.

  Yours faithfully,

  Isabel and Fran

  Ten o’clock was the bedtime of our family of two-and-three-quarters. When we’d been three, it had been later. Now, my parents preferred sleep to life. In a dream, you can be transported back to pre-war time and find yourself dancing at the Café Royal.

  I tried to imagine saying: ‘Good night, Mummy. Good night, Dad. I’m going to a play rehearsal now,’ but I couldn’t. If you are the hope and consolation of anyone alive, you can’t go to play rehearsals without warning.

  So, I knew what I would have to do. I would have to wait until the house was silent and then creep out of it without being heard and find my way to the tent in the moonlight, remembering first to go into the kitchen and steal a glass. The thought of this made me feel very hot and weak. I sat down on the sand, with my arms on my knees.

  ‘What are you doing, boy?’ said my father.

  ‘Resting,’ I said. ‘Only for a moment.’

  I stood at my bedroom window. There was a thin moon. Bright but thin.

  It was ten-eighteen by my watch.

  I could hear my mother coughing. She said the cough came from the sea air.

  At ten-thirty exactly, I let myself out of my room and closed my door. I stood on the landing, listening. There was no coughing now, no sound of anything.

  I went downstairs, holding my shoes. I tried to glide soundlessly, like film stars glide into rooms.

  I got a glass from the kitchen and unlocked the back door and went out into the night. I was wearing a grey shirt and grey flannel trousers and the things I could imagine most easily were all my grey veins going into my heart.

  I moved up the path. I couldn’t see the tent, but I could hear laughing – castle laughter. My mind seemed to be in holes, like a badminton net.

  The tent was small. I’d imagined a kind of marquee. This tent was low and tiny. It was pitched on a little clearing in the gorse.

  I bent down and called softly: ‘Isabel? Fran?’

  The laughter stopped. I could hear them whisperin
g. ‘I’ve come for the rehearsal,’ I said.

  There was silence. Then they giggled. Then Fran stuck her frizzy head out. ‘You’re late,’ she said.

  I began to explain and apologise.

  ‘Ssh,’ said Fran, ‘sound carries. Come inside.’

  She opened the little flap of the tent and took hold of my hand and pulled me in.

  It was pitch dark in the tent and very hot. I felt blind. Fran said: ‘Did you bring a glass?’ Isabel said: ‘Can you see us, Sebastian?’

  There was a familiar smell in the little bit of air left me to breathe in; it was the smell of gin.

  ‘You like gin, don’t you?’ said Isabel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘My mother drinks Gin and It.’

  They began giggling again. Now, I could see two soft white shapes, one either side of me. One was Fran and one was Isabel. They were wearing identical white nightdresses. Isabel handed me a glass of gin. She said: ‘It’s quite comfortable, don’t you think? We stole masses of cushions. Try the gin.’

  ‘And lie down,’ said Fran. ‘Relax.’

  I took a sip of the gin. I felt it go into my veins.

  I lay down, holding my glass in the air. I felt a hand on my face. I didn’t know whether it was Fran’s or Isabel’s. The hand removed my spectacles.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve got to,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘That’s the rehearsal,’ said Fran.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said Fran, ‘don’t you want to rehearse?’

  ‘You mean the play?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a kind of play, isn’t it, Isabel?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Except that there are two of us and only one of you and in the real future, when it’s no longer a play rehearsal, it won’t be like that. But it’s OK, because we’re so alike that in the dark you won’t be able to tell which of us is which.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. I let my glass tilt deliberately, splashing gin onto my face. The taste of it was beautiful.

  They giggled. I felt the skirts of their nightdresses cover my legs, like feathers. Then I saw both their faces above mine and their crazy hair touched my forehead and my cheek.

  ‘Come on, Sebastian,’ they whispered. ‘There’s nothing difficult about it.’

  I walked back to our house just as it was getting light.

  From high up, I could see my parents on the little front lawn, wearing their dressing gowns and clinging together.

  When they saw me, they stared at me in horror. Then my father broke away from my mother and came roaring at me. My mother followed, trying to catch him and hold him back.

  ‘Hughie!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t! Don’t!’

  But she couldn’t catch him. He hit me on the jaw and I fell to earth.

  I woke up in hospital, with a wire like a dog’s muzzle round my face. I couldn’t utter a word.

  My mother was sitting by me. She looked pale and tired.

  Later, she said: ‘It wasn’t only that we were worried, Lewis. There was the Martian business. He told me he saw them land. He saw them from his window. And he went running to find you and you weren’t there, and then, as soon as he arrived on the beach, they took off again. He thought it was because there was only one of him. And then he was in despair. He felt you’d let him down and let the world down.’

  I went back to school. I could move my jaw enough to say small words like ‘no’. Autumn came.

  My head had emptied itself of equations and filled up with the faces and bodies of Isabel and Fran.

  My father went away. My mother wrote: ‘They say it’s just for a while, until all’s well. But I know that the only all’s well is you.’

  The night after I got this letter, I had a dream. I was at home in Wiltshire, standing in the old, grey orchard.

  I saw something come out of the sky and land on the lawn. It was a shadowy thing, without shape or measurable angle, and I knew what it was: it was my life and it was a thing of no hope and no consolation. I wanted to send it back into the clouds, but it stayed there, just where it was, blotting out all the further hills.

  The Crossing of Herald Montjoy

  A piece of ground near Agincourt.

  October 1415.

  He does not have far to ride.

  The distance between the two encamped armies is little more than a mile. They are so close that at night-time, in the cold stillness, each can hear the laughter of the other, and the swearing and the cries. They’re like neighbouring farmers, eavesdropping in the moonlight.

  The French are noisier than the English. There are far more of them, they have more liquor and they seem to know more songs.

  Herald Montjoy walks out from the French camp, through the wood on the right towards Maisoncelles, and stands among the trees and listens to the English. He can hear a lot of hammering. He thinks the exhausted soldiers may be trying to make cabins out of elm. He remembers his little nephew, Roland, who has made a tree-house. He loves Roland. Having no children of his own, he’s tried to describe what he is to Roland. He has told him: ‘A herald is a watcher. It’s important to understand this. He oversees the conduct of armies, but doesn’t really belong to them. He’s not a man-at-arms, but a man apart.’

  Then, a morning comes, salt-white with frost, when Herald Montjoy is summoned to the Dauphin’s tent. The Dauphin instructs him to ride out across the fields to the English camp and enquire whether the English King is ready to ransom himself, to save his ragged army from certain defeat. The Dauphin’s tent is sumptuous with blue and gold hangings. The Dauphin is doing body-building exercises all the while he is talking. As Montjoy leaves the tent, he hears him say to the Duke of Alençon: ‘God, I’m fit.’

  Herald Montjoy gets on his horse. The land he must cross has been ploughed and he’s worried that the horse is going to stumble on the icy ridges of earth. A mist hangs on the fields, milky and dense, and the herald wishes that this, too, wasn’t there. This and the hard frost give the day such strange singularity.

  A piece of ground near the Manor of La Vallée.

  April 1412.

  He did not have far to ride.

  The distance between his parents’ house and the manor where Cecile lived was little more than two miles. He and his horse knew every step by heart. It was mostly downhill. And he would see the house long before he reached it. And always his thoughts flew ahead of him and landed, gentle as birds, on Cecile’s head and on her shoulders and on her feet in coloured shoes.

  She was so . . . exceptional He tried, on these journeys to and from her house, to decide what, if anything, she resembled – in nature, or in man’s inventions. He wondered whether he could compare her to a lake of water lilies where silvery fish glimmered deep down. Or was she like a sundial, unerring, yet always speaking, in her adoration of ephemeral things, of time’s passing?

  He decided there was nothing and no one as strangely beautiful as her. Not even the landscape through which he and his horse had to pass, with its flowering meadows, its clear stream, its silent woods and its perfumed air. Not even his dreams, in which he sometimes gave himself wings and flew up into the sky and floated above France.

  No. Cecile was more to him than any of these things. She kept honey bees in tall hives in her father’s orchard. Her beekeeping hat had a gossamer veil that fell to earth all round her, and whenever Herald Montjoy dreamed of flying above France, there below him walked Cecile in her bee-veil with nothing on underneath.

  He knew he had to marry Cecile. He had to possess her: her body, her soul, her petticoats, her bees, her shoe cupboard. He couldn’t wait much longer.

  He was a handsome man, with dark soft hair and a curling lip, and he had no doubt that when he proposed to Cecile he would be accepted. He would say to her father: ‘Sir, in two or three years’ time, I aim to become Chief Herald of France. I do not think that is an unrealistic boast.’

&nb
sp; Agincourt.

  October 1415.

  His hat is a strange confection, indigo blue with loops of velvet that fall just above his left eye and bounce up and down as the horse canters.

  This bouncing of his blue hat as he advances into the icy mist makes him fret. It’s as if everything is conspiring to blind him on this frozen day. He finds himself wishing it were night, with a round moon to light the field and the songs and the hammering of the English to guide him on. He feels that, under these conditions, he would see and think much more clearly; whereas, in this fog, with the forest petrified and silent close by, he feels confused and half-afraid.

  He reins in his horse and turns him into the wood and dismounts. He sets down the weighty standard by an oak tree.

  He ties the horse to the tree. He takes off his hat, runs a hand through his curly hair. All around him is the tracery of the night’s frost, fingering every spine. He asks himself: Why afraid, Montjoy?

  He is thirty years old, three years older than Henry of England.

  Is everyone on this piece of earth afraid of the battle that is there and not there in every mind? Of the future battle that is coming or may never happen – there and not there, departing like a lover, returning like a fever?

  The Dauphin isn’t afraid. ‘Afraid? Bunk!’ And then he admires his leg. ‘The English won’t last more than half an hour. If that.’

  His instructions reveal his nonchalance: ‘Just tell the King to give himself up for ransom, all right, Montjoy? Then that sack of bones he calls an army can go home and litter up Southampton.’

  He’s been told to ride fast, to return quickly. The Dauphin’s getting impatient with all the waiting. Montjoy has never disobeyed an order in his life, yet now he’s in the wood, scratching his head, standing still, staring at the trees. He feels as if he can’t make this crossing, but he doesn’t know why.

  La Vallée.

  April 1412.

  He felt weightless on that April morning. He felt as if he could swing himself up off his horse and into the air. He was wearing a sky-blue tunic. The sun shone on those soft curls of his.