Evangelista's Fan

by Rose Tremain

  Later, when Marianne was grown up and working in her profession, the three of them used to talk about it together. By then, the fear was gone.

  ‘He used to kick and beat her, Otto,’ says Lucie.

  ‘I know,’ says Otto, ‘but why is the revenge of women always so final?’

  ‘It has to be,’ says Lucie.

  ‘I’m sometimes asked to kill,’ says Marianne. ‘As an act of mercy. But I tell my patients, I heard the aftermath of a murder once. I’m not the person to ask.’

  Marianne is half asleep. Her hair is washed and dry. She hears a plane go over and imagines the American far above her, flying away from what he did to her and from what he believed Europe was doing to him. Confused Europe. Confused America. She lets him go. She doesn’t want revenge. All she longs for is to return to her independent life.

  Her telephone is ringing.

  At first, she thinks, it’s not for me, someone has got the wrong room. Then, because it goes on and on ringing, she picks it up.

  ‘Hey!’ says a familiar voice. ‘Got you at last. Just got back from the States this morning and I’ve been calling your hotel all day.’

  ‘Who is it?’ says Marianne.

  ‘Who is it? Who is it? Are you serious? It’s Nico. What’s the matter with you, Mother? Have you forgotten you’re in the old city?’

  ‘No,’ says Marianne. ‘Of course not. How could I forget a thing like that?’

  Ice Dancing

  Let me tell you about our house first. Then I’ll talk about us and the kind of people we are.

  Our house is in Maryland, USA. Our local town is called Cedar, but we’re nine miles from there, out on our own, facing a creek. We call the creek Our Creek and I built our house at the edge of it, with every window looking towards the water.

  I’m an architect. Retired now. This was my last big challenge, to arrange this house so that wherever you are in it you get a glimmer of Our Creek. Janet, my wife, didn’t believe I could do this. She said: ‘Don, what about the rooms at the back?’ I explained to her that there wouldn’t be any rooms at the back. ‘Sweetheart,’ I said, ‘think of the house as half a necklace and the water as a neck.’ The only thing that’s at the back of the house is the front door.

  Our Creek flows towards the mighty Chesapeake Bay. On summer evenings, Janet and I stand on our jetty, hand in hand, sipping a cocktail and watching the water slide by. Sometimes, we don’t talk. We just stand there watching and sipping and not talking. We’ve been married for thirty-seven years and now here we are in the place of our dreams. I began life as a clerk. Janet began life behind a Revlon counter.

  And we’ve travelled the world. We started life as dumb Americans, but we didn’t stay that way. We’ve been to England and France and Sweden. And Russia. We’ve got a whole heap of memories of Stockholm and Moscow. In Stockholm, we visited Strindberg’s apartment. We saw his bed and his inkstand and his hairbrushes. He used these brushes to fluff out his hair because he was embarrassed about his head. Not many Americans know this, that the great playwright Strindberg had a tiny little pinhead he was ashamed of.

  In Moscow, we witnessed a multiple wedding. We were standing in the snow. The doors of a gray building opened and out of them came a stream of brides, arm in arm with their bridegrooms. It was February. Ten degrees below. And the brides were wearing thin dresses of white net and carrying blood-red bouquets. Janet never got over this sight. Years later, we’d be lying in bed and she’d say: ‘Remember those Soviet brides, Don? Out in the cold like that.’ It upset her somehow.

  And yet winter is her favourite season. The year we moved into this house Our Creek froze. We woke up one morning and there it was: all the water normally headed for the Bay was frozen stock-still. We stood together at our bedroom window, gaping. We were snug in there, on account of the triple glazing I’d had fitted. I put my arm around Janet and held her to me and her body was warm as pie. ‘Don,’ she whispered, ‘let’s go out there. Let’s go out and dance on the ice.’

  I said: ‘What d’you mean, dance? We don’t have any skates.’

  ‘I don’t mean skate,’ she said. ‘I mean dance.’

  So that’s what we did. We went straight out there before breakfast. We got dressed up in Russian hats and our winter coats and our snow boots. We were sixty years old and we started singing and waltzing on the ice! We sang any old tune that came into our heads, but neither of us has got a voice and we’d forgotten most of the words, so the whole darn thing was crazy. And then, in the middle of it all, as we kept slipping and tripping and laughing, I had this vision of Strindberg. He was standing in the sky, staring down at us. And he wasn’t smiling. So I quit laughing and I said to Janet: ‘That’s enough. Time for breakfast.’

  ‘Oh why, Don?’ she said. ‘This is fun.’

  ‘It’s also suicidal,’ I said. ‘We never thought about that.’

  The thing I’ll tell you about next happened in Cedar.

  Cedar is a smart little Maryland town with three banks and two churches and an avenue of limes along Main Street. There isn’t one single cedar tree in it.

  We were on Main Street when this thing happened. I’d been to my bank and Janet had been in the hardware store, buying a hoze nozzle. It was a spring morning. The limes were coming into leaf and I stood on the sidewalk looking at Janet about to cross over to me and thinking, here she comes, my Revlon girl.

  She walked to the middle of the road and stopped. Then she fell down. She lay in the road. She didn’t try to get up.

  I ran to her. I could see a truck coming towards us. I put my arms out, waving it down. Other people came running. I knelt down and held onto Janet. Her eyes were open and her face was yellow-white.

  ‘Honey,’ I said, ‘what happened?’

  She held onto me. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, trying to make words, but no words came out.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘it’s OK, it’s OK . . .’

  I sent a boy on a skateboard to call for an ambulance. There was a whole cluster of people round us now. I had to ask them politely to step back, to give Janet some air, to give me room to lift up her head.

  We got her to the hospital. The doctors were confused. They said: ‘It may have been a mild epileptic seizure. We’re not sure. We’ll do some tests. Meanwhile, she’s fine. You can go see her.’

  She was pink again and sitting up in bed. She was wearing a hospital gown, tied at the back. She took my hands in hers. She said: ‘I’m sorry, honey. I thought I was back in Danesville, that’s all.’

  Danesville, West Virginia, was Janet’s old home town. Her Dad worked in a glass foundry there. Her mother had raised four children on a foundryman’s wage and sent the only girl, Janet, to Beauty School.

  After two days at the hospital, they sent Janet home. They told me: ‘We can’t pinpoint anything at the present time. It isn’t epilepsy. Let us know if she has more falls.’

  We went home. We had to drive through Cedar, past the exact spot where Janet had fallen down, and I knew I would never go by this place without remembering Janet lying in the road. I thought this would be the thing that would trouble me most in the weeks to come.

  But the weeks to come were like no other weeks in my whole life. Boy-o-boy.

  The Janet I took home from the hospital was the Janet I knew, but right from this day the Janet I knew started to slip away from me.

  She went back into her past. Not all the time. Sometimes, she was right there with me and we’d play a sensible game of rummy or do the crossword or go down to the jetty together and listen and watch for signs of spring. And then, without any warning, bang, her mind got up and walked away someplace else. Mainly, it walked to Danesville. She’d say: ‘Don, the temperature on the foundry floor is one hundred thirty degrees fahrenheit. Daily temperatures of this kind burn up a person’s life.’ Or she’d think our kitchen, with all its built-in appliances, was her mother’s old kitchen and she’d complain about soot. She’d say to me, in a simpering voi
ce like her mother’s: ‘Modern detergents are not designed to cope with old-fashioned problems.’

  Sometimes, talking to her would help and sometimes it wouldn’t.

  Sometimes, if I sat her down and stroked her head and said: ‘Janet, you are not in Danesville, sweetheart. You are here in the home I built for you, all safe and sound,’ she would come out of her trance and say: ‘Sure, Don, I know that. You don’t need to tell me.’

  Then it could happen, too, that she mistook me for one of her brothers. I’d say: ‘I am not Charlie, Janet. Charlie was bald, remember? I’ve got hair like old Strindberg, wild and fluffy.’ But she’d refuse to believe me. She’d say: ‘You’re Charlie. You always were a prankster. And who’s Strindberg?’

  She got clumsy. She’d always been a meticulous woman. Now, she dropped things and spilled her food and burned her hands on the stove. I said to her one day: ‘Janet, I can’t stand this any more.’ I left the house and went down to the jetty and got into the little canoe we keep tied up there and paddled off down the creek in the rain. I started crying like a baby. I hadn’t cried since I was an office clerk.

  They operated on Janet on June 30th. It was a hot morning.

  Her condition is called hydrocephalus. Water builds up inside the skull and presses on the brain. If the water can’t be drained off, parts of the brain atrophy. Then the person slips away – back into the past or to any place where she can’t be reached. The success rate of the operation to drain off the water is variable according to age. About thirty per cent of those operated on die.

  Death, to me, has always been synonymous with falling. This is how my mind sees it; a long, black, sickening fall. And Janet saw it the same. I once asked her.

  Before Janet’s operation, the surgeon came to see me. He said: ‘Go home. Dig the yard. Mend a fence. This is a long operation. She’s in our hands now. There’s nothing you can do.’

  I said: ‘Sure. I understand.’

  But I didn’t leave. I sat on a chair in a Waiting Area and concentrated my mind on holding Janet up.

  I held her in different ways. I carried her above my head, holding her waist and her thigh. When this got tiring, I put her on my back – her back to my back – and her legs made an arc around mine. Then I flew her above me, my hands on her tummy. I stood her on my shoulders and hung onto her feet . . .

  People came into the Waiting Area. They looked at magazines. They read the words ‘Ford’ or ‘Toyota’ on their car key tags. They didn’t bother me. They recognised that I was busy.

  To help me, I sang songs in my mind and I whirled Janet around in time to these. I dressed her in a floaty kind of dress to make her lighter in my imaginary arms. As the hours passed, she got younger. Her hair hung down like it used to when she was a Revlon girl . . .

  Then someone spoke to me. It was the surgeon. He seemed to have learned my first name. ‘Donald,’ he said, ‘I’m pretty sure your wife’s going to make it.’

  They kept her in hospital quite a long while. Then I took her home and the summer passed and then the fall and now here we are again in the winter and this morning we woke up to find Our Creek covered with ice.

  Every day, I watch Janet. I watch and wait, for the least sign that she’s slipping back to Danesville, but none comes.

  She’s in fine spirits, too, keen to do things. She says we should travel again, see more of the world before we leave it.

  Today, we dress up warm and go down to the creek and Janet says: ‘Come on, Don, look at this great ice! Let’s dance and fool around on it like we did before.’

  She’s at the end of the jetty. She’s all ready to climb down onto the frozen water.

  But I can see that this ice is pretty thin. It’s not like it was in that other winter, two foot thick; it’s a different kind of ice.

  So I call Janet back. I say: ‘Honey, don’t go down there. It’s too dangerous. Enough dancing already. Right? Just stay up here with me.’

  Negative Equity

  On the night of his fortieth birthday, Tom Harris dreams about a flotilla of white ships.

  For a while, he enjoys this dream and feels safe in it. He’s admiring the ships from a distance, from a dry cliff. He’s wondering, lazily, if they’re taking part in a race and looks past them for a fluorescent marker buoy.

  The next moment, he realises he’s no longer safe. He’s in the water, in among the flotilla. He’s trying to swim and call out at the same time, but he knows that his head’s too small to be seen in the rough water and that his voice is too feeble to be heard. He dreams that he’s about to die and so he wakes himself up and still feels frightened and says to his wife Karen: ‘Actually, they weren’t ships. They were dishwashers and ovens. They were kitchen appliances.’

  Karen is Danish. She is forty-three. Her voice is as gentle as a nocturne. She says to Tom in this soft voice of hers: ‘I think it’s rather peculiar that they should be floating like ships. Would they do that? Is it their hollowness?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Tom, holding onto Karen’s hand. ‘Perhaps they would float for a while, like empty oil drums, if their doors were shut.’

  ‘But I can’t imagine it,’ says Karen. ‘Ovens bobbing around on the waves. In my mind, they would certainly go down to the bottom.’

  Tom and Karen lie silent for a while, just touching. It’s a May morning, but their bedroom window is small and doesn’t let in much sunshine. The house where they live has always been dark. Tom’s mind has now let go of the dream and is concentrated on the realisation of being forty. But he notices that the figure 4 is ship-shaped, and he wonders whether somehow, at forty, a man loses ground and has to set sail for a new place. Karen listens to the noisy summer birds and says after a while: ‘I dreamed about the new house.’

  ‘Did you?’ says Tom. This house is their future. They refer to it as the Scanda-house because they’re building it to a Danish design, with warm pine floors and solar heating.

  Karen gets up and puts on her white dressing gown. ‘I think I’m going to go and see how the builders are getting on today. Shall I?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Tom. ‘Why not?’

  Then they hear Rachel get up and start talking to her cat. Rachel is twelve and their only child. She has long, smooth limbs and long, smooth, bright hair, like Karen’s. Tom, who is dark and small, often finds it strange that he lives his life in the company of these two tall women who are so beautiful and so fair. It’s both wonderful and difficult. It’s like living with two all-knowing angels.

  Tom Harris is a diver. His official title is Coastwatcher. His territory is a ribbon of sea bed ten miles long and a mile wide and his task is to examine this area for signs of life and death. He knows his job is an important one. The periphery of every living thing can yield information about the health of the whole. He was told this at his interview. ‘Consider the tail of the bison, Mr Harris,’ they said, ‘the fin of a whale and the extreme outer branches of a fir.’ And Tom is happier in this job than in any he’s had. His tools are those of the archaeologist – the trowel, the knife, the brush, the memory, the eye – but his site is infinitely more vast and changeful than any ruin or barrow. Anything on earth can be returned to the sea and found there.

  He wonders what he will find today, the first day of his forty-first year. In Denmark, as a child, staying near Elsinore for the summer, Karen found a lapis lazuli brooch in a rock pool. She has been proud of this find, always. And in his nine years as a coastal diver Tom has found nothing as beautiful or as valuable as this. But his discoveries have a private value. Sometimes they’re so odd that his mind starts work on a story to explain how they got to be there and this gives him a nervous kind of satisfaction. He used to tell the stories to Rachel, but now, for reasons he’s unclear about, they have a harsher edge. And he no longer talks to Rachel at bedtime. She prefers talking to her blue-eyed cat. The cat’s name is Viola. ‘Viola,’ says Rachel, ‘quite soon we’re going to live in a much more brilliant house.’

  Tom
drives an old Land Rover to the sea. He leaves early, while Rachel and Karen eat their muesli and talk softly together. This morning, as he drives away from the house, he thinks, suppose I never saw them again? Suppose I could never again wake up with Karen? Suppose Rachel’s life were to be lived without me? He’s never had any tragedy in his life. He can’t imagine how certain kinds of tragedy can be borne.

  He follows a similar routine each day. He meets his co-diver, Jason, and they put on their wet suits. They comb the beach for lumps of oil and plastic waste and dead things. Jason is a neat man with a lively smile and an old passion for Jane Fonda. In summer, they occasionally find the drowned body of a dune-nesting lark. Cod come into the shallow water and are stranded by the fierce ebb tide and bloat in death. Tom and Jason note the quantity of bladderwrack, the precise colour of the spume on the breakers and the presence or absence of sea birds. They breathe in the wind. Through binoculars, they examine the sea for trawlers and tugs. Sometimes, vast sections of an oil rig are pulled across the horizon, like a piece of scenery across a film location.

  They return to Tom’s Land Rover and make notes on their beach observation. Jason always brings a Thermos of coffee ‘to keep up the body temperature’. (His idol, Jane, has taught him everything he wants to know about the body). Then, they put on their masks and their lamps and their compressed air cylinders, strap on their instruments and walk to the water, carrying their flippers.

  Crashing through the waves always troubles Tom – the bulkiness of them, their roar. They’re a barrier to where he wants to be. He’s not happy until he starts to dive and then he begins to feel it: the thrill of the sudden silence, of the long, beautiful downward flight into darkness. The light closes above his feet and the world is filleted away. He feels ardent, single-minded, like a man travelling to a longed-for rendezvous. He describes this feeling to Karen as happiness and instead of being offended she’s amused. ‘It’s so Nordic, Tom!’ she says. ‘Really and truly.’