Making up her minds
Jane Charteris
EVANGELISTA'S FAN AND OTHER STORIES by Rose Tremain Sinclair-Stevenson, £14.99, pp. 189 Rose Tremain's imagination is an unfettered thing. It roams through the centuries, over nations; it empathises with young and old, male and female; it effort- lessly weaves the grand abstractions into the diurnal round. And it makes no conces- sion to where it is. There is no archaic diction, no piling on of period detail to provide dubious authenticity. Her writing is so sure, her voice so clear, that all that is necessary is a slight change of tone and the occasional geographical reference to allow the reader to get his bearings. These are not stories which aim at a literal truth, but ones which reach towards an altogether truer and more universal understanding. If there is a theme running through Evangelista 's Fan and Other Stories, Tremain's third collection, it is the human mind, its enormous potential, its limita- tions in coming to terms with time's pass- ing and its vulnerability to both emotional and physical attack. Here are minds lost to love, to grief, to disease, to age; and minds recovered through love and hope.
In 'John-Jim', one of the shortest but most affecting stories, a little girl says of the Pier Pavilion where she is taken by her father that inside it
there were far more things going on than you could imagine from the outside; it was like the human mind in this one respect.
When the Pavilion detaches itself from the pier by a mere five inches, it is deemed unsafe and towed away. A new one is built eventually, with 'sponsored girders', one of which bears the name of John-Jim, her little brother who cannot grow. But when, years later, he is diagnosed as having Creutsfeldt Jacob Disease, picked up through the growth hormones he was given as a tod- dler, his mind cannot be towed away and rebuilt. In 'Ice-Dancing', a retired architect and his wife throw caution to the winds and dance on their frozen creek:
We were 60 years old and we started singing and waltzing on the ice . . . the whole darn thing was crazy.
But it was solid, like their life together — until Janet's mind 'got up and walked away someplace else'. While the doctors operate to relieve the hydrocephalus, Don concen- trates his mind on 'holding Janet up': I held her in different ways. I carried her above my head .. . I put her on my back .. . Then I flew her above me, my hands on her tummy. I stood her on my shoulders . . . People came into the waiting area. They didn't bother me. They recognised that I was busy.
Janet makes a full recovery, but Don won't let her dance on the ice anymore. He has seen the fragility of it all.
There is nothing sentimental about these small tragedies. It is probable that Tremain is incapable of writing a sentimental word. She is too aware of the comic, the ridicu- lous and the bathetic. An adolescent boy, whose father believes the Martians' arrival is imminent and sculpts enormous landing sights on a beach for the spaceship, thinks that if he were a Martian he would land on the roof of a nearby castle: I would go and join the laughing people; 1 would say, 'I see you have a badminton net suspended between two conveniently situated trees.'
When his father cries because he has over- looked provisions for the alien visitors, his son says:
It won't matter, 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?
In the title story, a young 19th-century clocicmaker dreams that he is walking 'arm- in-arm with his love in a field of string beans', which 'touch his leg seductively.'
Tremain's never fairing ability to surprise and to challenge is one of her greatest strengths. 'Evangelista's Fan' is at once a story about the young clockmaker Salvatore's attempts to 'repair time', both literally and figuratively (the King of Pied- mont has decreed that the 27 years exactly coincidental with Salvatore's first 27 never existed, so upset was he by the French Rev- olution and his years of exile during the wars with Napoleon), and his struggle to overcome his enthralment to a vision of perfection, once glimpsed behind a fan in his shop. The manner in which he achieves the latter is typical Tremain, both shocking and amusing.
Readers of Restoration and, particularly, Sacred Country will immediately feel at home in this collection. And, like me, they will long for the next full-length, richly textured novel. Excellent as they are, these stories are like a Chinese meal: they fill you up for a short time, but all too soon you're hungry again.
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