Evangelista's Fan (14 page)

‘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.'

He moves slowly across the sea bed, his meanderings guided by the compass attached to his wrist. Steer north-east and the continental shelf will eventually drop away and leave him poised above the real depths he's never entered. So he goes in a westerly way, remembering to stay quite close to Jason, the sea grass just brushing his body, his lamp like a cartoon wand creating a pathway of colour in front of him. Clusters of tiny brownfish explode into sudden stillness, like spilt wild rice, petrified by its light.

He's hoping for some discovery today, for something man-made, trailing a thread of story. He remembers the megaphone and the thurible. The stories he made up around these have taken on substance in his mind, as if they were events and not inventions.

He keeps swimming west, then, signalling to Jason, north a little, out towards the deep. He finds a rusty camera and a bicycle wheel – nothing of interest. He and Jason measure the areas where the sea grass has died.

And so the day passes. He spends quite a lot of it thinking about his two demanding angels and the Scanda-house he's building for them, so that more light can fall on their hair and on their breakfast spoons.

When Rachel has done her homework and taken Viola upstairs (‘I don't want her going out at night. She chases birds'), Karen makes strawberry tea and sits at the kitchen table opposite Tom. She warms and warms her hands on the tea mug. ‘Tom,' she says, ‘you know I went to the mortgage people today?'

‘Did you? I thought you were going to see the builders.'

‘First the builders. Then the mortgage people about the new loan.'

‘And?'

‘The Scanda-house can't be finished unless we take out another loan, can it?'

‘No. But there shouldn't be a problem. This house is worth far more than we've borrowed, so when we sell it—'

‘It isn't, Tom. Not any more.'

‘What are you talking about, Karen?'

‘They sent a young man back here with me. He looked at this house. Just
looked
at it. Barely came inside. Didn't even go upstairs. He said, “Mrs Harris, there's no question of any further loan. You already have negative equity on this property.”'

‘Negative equity?'

‘It's a term. Nowadays, there's a term for everything you can't quite believe could ever happen. I suppose the term is meant to make it real to you.'

‘It's not “real” to me. What does it mean?'

‘You haven't heard it? I'd heard it somewhere. Out in the air somewhere. It means the house is worth less than the sum we've borrowed on it.'

‘It's not, Karen. We had three valuations.'

‘But they were a while ago and now all its value is gone. I mean, like water or something. Or into the same air where all these new terms come from. It has just gone heaven knows where. And so I don't see how the Scanda-house is ever going to be completed now.'

Tears start to fall into Karen's tea. Tom feels a hollow place open inside him and bloat with misery. He reaches out and takes Karen's hand and says weakly: ‘You may have been misinformed. They may be quite wrong.' He wishes this moment were a story or a dream. ‘I'll look into it, Karen,' he says. ‘I'll go into it, love.'

He takes a day off. He talks to the builders, to the mortgage company, to the bank loans department. He is told that the gap between what his present house is worth and what he has borrowed to pay for the new one is now approximately £40,000. The only way the Scanda-house can be finished is by borrowing yet more. But nobody will lend him any more because he can't, now, repay the existing loan. His collateral is used up, suddenly, without any warning, like the compressed air in a cylinder that has no reserve valve. He can't move.

He tells Karen he will find a way. ‘What way?' she says. ‘Tell me what way.'

‘I don't know,' he says, ‘but I will.'

They say nothing to Rachel. One evening, she informs the cat: ‘Our room in the Scanda-house is going to be right up in the roof, Viola, and we're going to be able to see the sea.'

Tom considers asking Karen to go back to work. She used to be an art teacher. One day, she said: ‘I can't do this any more, Tom. These children are too savage for me. In Denmark, pupils are not like this.'

She got Tom's agreement. He could see that the children had no interest in the kind of knowledge that Karen could give. So Karen left the school and stayed at home and painted and now and then made a little money from drawings and watercolours. One of the things promised to her in the new house is a studio of her own. It would have a big, sliding window and a balcony made of steel. And Tom longs to see her in there, working quietly, in her own space at last. He can't ask her to return to teaching. He
can't
. She's forty-three. She wants a sunny house with a studio and her days alone with her painting. It's not unreasonable.

Back he goes, down into the deep, to think, to try to work it out. He moves more slowly than usual over the sea bed, barely noticing what appears in the beam of his lamp. He feels like the victims of his stories about the megaphone and the thurible, caught up in something they never intended, that no one intended, but which happened nevertheless. He retells the stories to himself, to see if they shed light on his predicament:

Tom stops and thinks, so much of our life is invention, so much the way we
choose
to see it. I see Karen and Rachel as my bossy angels. Karen sees the lost land of her childhood coming back to her in the guise of a house. The men I work for see this ribbon of water as the conscience of England. In both cases, I have inherited so much responsibility.

‘Oh no,' said Karen, when Tom told her these stories, ‘I see the endings. I see tragedy coming. Don't tell me. I hate tragedy, when it's so senseless.'

As Tom swims on, he realises a truth that he's never understood before: he wants, through the design of the new house, to remind Karen that England is only partly a dark place, that it can be calm, not savage, that beautiful light often falls on it. This, in his imagination, is why it matters so much. His worst fear is that Karen will leave, one day, and go back to a place where she once found lapis lazuli in the water.

Sailing yachts and kitchen appliances: he dreams of them often now. The thing which is nimble and defies the water; the thing which, superseded, might float for a while and then sinks.

Karen gets used to this dream of his. When he wakes and reaches for her hand, she just strokes it gently and says: ‘That old dream, Tom. It's so rotten to you. I wish it would go.'

One morning, she says: ‘I told Rachel about the Scanda-house. I explained there is nothing we can do. Just make it watertight and wait. She understands.'

And they're being so good about it now, his fair women. Hardly any tears from Karen after that first time; no sulking from Rachel. They've understood what's happened and that's that. In the mornings, when he leaves, there they are, chatting softly together, as if the future were going to arrive today. They eat their muesli. They raise their faces to his for a goodbye kiss, exactly as they always and always did.

He's the one who cries. Nobody sees him do it, not even Jason. He tries not to see himself do it. He dives down to the sea floor and switches off his lamp, so that darkness round him is as absolute as the darkness of the grave, and lets his tears fall. His sobs, through his breathing apparatus, sound unearthly.

He does little searching for human objects any more. He prefers lying in the dark. He's tired of the stories men tell. The only thing he's started to long for is to go beyond the coastal shelf, to go to the true deep, where all the variety of the ocean lives. He's begun to believe – at least with half his mind – that only if he is brave enough, insane enough, to go down into this vast darkness will he find the solution to the problem of the house.

One evening, Tom comes home and hears Karen talking on the telephone to her mother, Eva. He can understand quite a bit of Danish. Karen is telling Eva that she's waiting for her life to change. She says: ‘I'm not
living
my life any more, Mama. I'm waiting to start it again, when I've got my studio.'

He sits down dumbly and listens to this conversation. He knows that Eva has offered to lend them money, but that the money offered is nowhere near enough and, even if it were, it couldn't be accepted because it couldn't be repaid. Eva is a kind woman and she has passed this quality of kindness onto Karen.