Read Online Evangelista's Fan by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Where to?’ I asked.
    â€˜I don’t know where to. I don’t suppose that matters. Just away somewhere.’
    I said: ‘Do you mean France?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What about the sea?’ said my mother. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
    â€˜You mean, in the summer?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘They’re brilliant.’
    â€˜ Two ,’ he said triumphantly.
    â€˜How did you know how big to make them?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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