Evangelista's Fan (7 page)

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.'

‘What 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.

‘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:

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.