Evangelista's Fan by Rose Tremain Page B

you. I want your forgiveness. I would like us to be friends.’
    â€˜I can’t forgive you,’ said Mercedes. ‘I never will.’
    â€˜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.
    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
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    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