Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  ‘I will if he’ll come.’

  Two at a time the girl jumped down the stairs. There was something engagingly childish in her exuberance. From the balcony Julia Garnet watched her wave and walk across the campo (quite as if she owned the world) until the boyish shape turned across the bridge and out of sight.

  * * *

  No doubt it was the partial success of this foray into socialising that prompted Julia Garnet to take an evening stroll towards the quarter of the city where the Hotel Gritti Palace was located. She did not go with any fully formed purpose—but the invitation of the departing Americans, issued from the bows of the water taxi, remained guiltily at the back of her mind. She had been remiss in not responding sooner; and besides, she owed them still for the taxi fare.

  Maybe it was the opulence of the interior of the hotel, or the subconscious wish not to be reminded of anything which connected her with what she increasingly was coming to regard as her old life, but at the reception desk she found that her memory had played her false: by no wise was she able to recall the Americans’ name.

  ‘They are friends, no?’ asked the porter. He was bald and not much interested.

  ‘Not friends, no,’ said Julia Garnet, flustered.

  The porter evinced a lazy surprise. ‘So if not friends, please, what is it?’ His expression verged on the insolent.

  ‘Acquaintances,’ said Julia Garnet, annoyed that her efforts at social intercourse were being thwarted. ‘I met them on my way here. In a taxi,’ she added unnecessarily.

  ‘A taxi?’ The man lifted his eyebrows as if hinting at an impropriety peculiar to foreigners. But as he spoke the situation was remedied for the voice of Cynthia Cutforth came distinctly down the stairway.

  Julia Garnet, turning from the porter’s disbelief prepared for blank looks, was pleasantly surprised when Cynthia cried out, ‘Why hello! We saw you in St Mark’s but you know we didn’t like to…’

  Julia explained, rather sheepishly, about the fare she had come to repay but the tall pair wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘We took your place,’ Charles said. ‘It was so rude of us. We have hoped to meet with you again and apologise.’

  ‘Do let us make up for it now,’ his wife said. ‘Please won’t you dine with us? The food here is quite reasonable. And how is your leg? I was horrified when I saw how you had hurt it.’

  The dining room of the Gritti was all marble grandeur: Soundless waiters pulled back chairs and whisked linen napkins dramatically from table to lap. But Julia Garnet, in spite of being unprepared for the occasion, found that something had changed within her. She had ceased to be inhibited—at least in these present surroundings. Maybe it was because she did not mind what these people thought of her. Rich and groomed as they were they had no power to disturb her. In any event she became something of the life and soul for the evening.

  ‘No, really!’ she exclaimed as the waiter brought silver-domed dishes under which lay inky cuttlefish, stout portions of turbot and serried ranks of tiny exotic vegetables, ‘I had to resort to walloping. It was him or me!’

  She was describing her relationship with Michael Morrell, a pupil whose naughtiness had so plagued her that one day—driven to distraction by his refusal to sit still in class—she had chased him into the corridor and whacked him hard on the behind.

  The Cutforths listened apparently fascinated to this piece of British anthropology. Cynthia vaguely indicated that in Philadelphia they had other ways of doing things, but their demeanour was respectful, even deferential. And Charles ventured, ‘I was whacked good and often as a kid. I can’t say it did me harm. I wonder sometimes if we are too liberal in our educational policies?’

  Julia Garnet no longer knew if hers was a behaviour she herself could now endorse. Michael Morrell, it is true, had responded to the episode with surly respect. And he had ceased to be so disruptive a force in the classroom. Maybe she had done the boy no harm? She couldn’t tell. What was apparent was that she had made a hit with the Americans. He, she learned, was an academic whose subject was Venetian trade with the Levant. He described a house with a picture of a camel raised in relief on the outside. A twelfth-century merchant from the Levant travelled to Venice to set up a trading business. His fortunes having prospered he built a house and sent for his young wife to join him. Through a scribe she wrote: But how shall I find you when I arrive in Venice?—I cannot read. Her husband wrote back to her: When you arrive in Venice ask for the camel—everyone will know it and therefore where our house is.

  ‘Not very liberated,’ Cynthia laughed.

  ‘Or perhaps very?’ Julia countered, thinking it might have been fun to be the Levantine merchant’s wife and have a camel waiting for her, a landmark of home, as she set out on her own to a strange environment.

  In return for the camel she told them about the Chapel-of-the-Plague. Charles, who had lighted a series of little cheroots (‘I’m afraid I’ve given up trying to get him to stop!’ his wife interjected as he lit the second), was intrigued. ‘I don’t know it but I must look it up. That would be the Black Death, I guess, which wiped out half of Europe. Giuseppe will know all about it, I’ll ask him.’

  ‘Charles has made terrific friends with a dubious Catholic priest,’ Cynthia laughed.

  Listening to their banter Julia realised that prejudice had led her to an assumption that the rich were stupid. The Cutforths were, in fact, highly cultivated. They told her where to find the camel in the region of Tintoretto’s parish church. ‘That has also been restored by your Venice in Peril people.’ Charles was enthusiastic. ‘They’ve done a fabulous job. You should go. Tintoretto’s buried there and there was a Bellini once. An early one but a beaut nonetheless. Some hooligan stole it. I’d sentence those guys to the electric chair!’

  The Cutforths were amused—delighted, even?—to discover that their guest was a Communist sympathiser. (‘And there I was,’ cried Cynthia, ‘imagining you were a duchess. I was going to write to all my friends!’ ‘Didn’t I always say it—scratch a Democrat and you get to find a snob!’ her husband had remarked, rubbing his wife’s knee affectionately.)

  ‘Which only goes to show,’ Julia said to herself on leaving the hotel to walk home, ‘that it is possible to have spent a lifetime being wrong.’

  Politely, she had declined Charles’s offer to go with her. ‘No, no it is quite safe and I enjoy the walk!’—for it was her private luxury that there was only one tall man she wished to have accompany her.

  Walking home, she actually laughed aloud, recalling her faithlessness to the Reverend Crystal. Before coming to Venice she could never have imagined such an evening.

  * * *

  The next day Signora Mignelli said something incomprehensible and when it became apparent she had not been understood went and fetched a tall bees-wax candle and pointed to the Angelo Raffaele. ‘For Our Lady,’ she said, working her lips in an effort to make herself understood. ‘It is to clean?’

  Some ritual to cleanse the church, perhaps? The ochre candle looked enticing, and later that afternoon Julia walked round to the fondamenta where the Archangel had first smiled down upon her. Looking up at him again, on his shelf above the chiesa door, she saw the sculptor had given him wrinkled stockings. What a comforting sort Raphael was! Somehow the stockings made her think of the Levantine merchant’s wife travelling across the seas to find her husband.

  The dark green water-weathered doors lay open back. Stepping through the vestibule she made out a procession of candles punctuating the fine gloom with little swaying hollows of light. As she stood the notes of a chant started up. What a world she had entered coming to Venice; a world of strange ritual, penumbras, rapture. Timidity crept over her, the old insidious sense of not belonging, and she stepped back out of the wax-laden smell into the harshness of the foggy air.

  Outside Nicco was dribbling a football across the campo.

  ‘Ciao, Giulia!’

  ‘Ciao, Nicco. Nicco, the chiesa. What is happening? What are th
e candles for?’

  Nicco frowned. His father’s promise to send him to London was proving an inadequate spur to his mastery of English. ‘For Maria,’ he explained.

  ‘But the candles…?’

  Nicco smiled. ‘I visit tomorrow.’ He scuffed at the football, too polite actually to run off.

  Sensing his impatience she let him go. ‘All right, Nicco. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  * * *

  It was Carlo when he called by who enlightened her. ‘It is the feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin,’ he explained. ‘Candlemas, if you prefer.’

  Julia did prefer. ‘Why ever does she need purifying? Isn’t she dripping with holiness already?’

  ‘It was the custom after childbirth. Six weeks after the birth the woman must undergo the rites of purification. How is the boy you are teaching? I never see him here. You see him often?’ For the first time in their acquaintance Carlo’s face seemed to her to have an unfriendly aspect.

  ‘How very chauvinist,’ said Julia, more tartly than she felt, worried that she had maybe shocked him. ‘Nicco is extremely lazy, thank you for asking. I’m wondering whether I should really bother to go on teaching him.’ She began to tell him of her visit to the Cutforths but the evening which had gone so swingingly became boring in the recounting. For some reason there was none of the usual flow between them and he left more abruptly than usual.

  I suppose they’re all touchy about their faith, even if they don’t make a song and dance about it, she thought, undressing for her bath. Waiting for it to fill (you could not hurry Signora Mignelli’s bath—the water pressure was low and the water arrived in trickles) she examined herself in the wardrobe looking-glass. Her body stared out at her, stringy, like a plucked fowl.

  The water when she climbed in was hot and watching the heat turn her skin red she felt more than ever like ‘an old boiler’. Observing the limbs floating before her—almost as if they did not belong to her at all—she pondered on the unpredictability of human relationship.

  She had spent her life avoiding people, afraid, as she now saw, of their dislike or disapproval. With her firm mind and her astringent views she had provided herself with the means to confound intimacy. If people had wanted to know her—and really she couldn’t tell whether they had or not—she had found ways of ensuring that they never approached too far. Carlo had been an exception—a delightful one—for if he had noticed any attempt at ‘confounding’ he had given no sign but had simply advanced, with long-legged aplomb, into relationship with her. And in so doing he had made out a way for others to follow.

  And it was the case she had begun to take his good opinion for granted. Surprise at his seeming to want to go on seeing her—even to see more of her—had given way to the pleasures of anticipating his next appearance and the planning of their next expedition. And yet, today, something had, if not exactly gone wrong, certainly not been right between them. As if by some invisible and malignant presence she felt pulled down. The superstitious part of her related the small reversal in her relationship with Carlo to her pride in it the evening she spent with the Cutforths. Even to yourself, she thought, it wasn’t safe to boast.

  Lying in the small bathroom the peeling yellow walls suddenly appeared drab and ugly. The book—she had made such slow progress with it, a book on Garibaldi about whom she found she did not much care—which she had taken to read while bathing, had got wet and she laid it down and began to think about her pupil, Michael Morrell. Where was he now? Had he become a crook or a bank manager? (Either seemed equally possible.) If he had not prospered no doubt it was in part due to her: she had been an indifferent teacher. It was evident that Nicco, polite as he was, found her so. And she had been so cocky about teaching him. After a while she nodded off and woke, knees bent, to feel her mouth beneath cold water.

  Now that was unwise, she said to herself as, half covered in a towel, she poured some of the brandy from the square bottle which she had purchased after her lunch at Nicco’s cousin’s. The experience of sliding so easily towards death frightened her. Somehow she associated it with Carlo and her unclear sense of his possible displeasure with her.

  Let us speak of exile. There are two ways with exile: you can fit in, lie low, ‘do as the Chaldeans do’, as we say—or you can stick out like a lone crow. No prizes for guessing which my renegade kinsfolk chose!

  But I must own in the early days of exile I was glad enough to be in Nineveh once the shame of conquest was over. I missed the rolling hills and the pleasant pastures of Galilee. But I had a piece of luck early on in my time in Nineveh: the king took a fancy to me and made me his Purveyor of Goods, so that in those first years of exile I got to travel far over the mountains to the country of Media, bartering and purchasing for the king of Assyria, and often I met the children of Israel there. We are a shrewd people and our swift reasoning and inventive minds proved useful to our captors. Therefore, many found themselves, as I did, well settled in the new life into positions which commanded respect.

  But the king of Assyria died, as kings do, and not long after I lost my place at the old court. The old king had had a great new palace built by many slaves with gardens of sweet herbs and tulip trees and broad, high walls built around the city by the River Tigris. In the old days I had lived within these walls with my wife and had walked in the gardens with my son among the monkeys and the peacocks. When the old king died the tribes of Judah made wars against the new king so that when he returned from battle, defeated, he took his rage out on those of us who had been settled in Nineveh. One day, in his chariot, he drove past me walking in the gardens and lashed at me with his whip. It had become dangerous to be one of the chosen people.

  Brutal purges began, with the bodies of our people left unburied to stink on the city walls for scavenging dogs to devour. I hated those dogs. I still recall a certain yellow brute; head of a pack he was and I called him Khan after one of the devils in these regions who is reputed to relish dead flesh. This yellow canine devil got scent of what I did and would follow me around snuffing out corpses. Then it was often a struggle between him and me—whether I would get to bury the body or he would grab it for his pack. He hit me once and the Rib had me bound up with flax and crocodile dung for a month against the foaming sickness. She was a follower of the local medicine man’s magic—I couldn’t have stopped her consulting him even if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t want to; she needed every prop she could find.

  With the death of the old king my heart began to dwell on Jerusalem and the days I had travelled there to offer tithes. It came to my mind then that we had been punished by the Lord God for our failure to do as He had commanded: we had not kept faith with the law, the rituals and the rites—therefore we had been taken into exile. Yet all around me I watched our people forgetting the law of the book, the prayers, the observances, the dietary requirements, alms-giving, the warning words of the prophets. And for us the observances of death are strict; it is sacrilegious that one of our own should lie breeding maggot-flies in the sun. Therefore, when I came across one of my kin murdered by the king or his officers, I would make it my business to take the corpse into our own house until sundown, away from the mouths of the yellow dog pack. When the sun dropped, lone-handed I would bury the body.

  It is a business, digging the ground in these parts. The dragging and the heaving are enough to tire you out. And then the flies, and the vile stink if the corpse has been exposed long. No, it was not a task to take on lightly, especially since the royal guard were on alert to catch the corpse-snatcher. And in the end a certain one of our tribe in Nineveh, doubtless seeking advancement or immunity for his own family, went and informed on me. With the news that I was a wanted man and that I would he hunted to be put to death I left the city in haste and went into hiding. My house was entered, my possessions stripped from me, all that we had worked to acquire, the chased silverware I had bought from the Aramaean traders, the linen from Egypt, the bolts of dyed cloth from Tyre, the carved boxes an
d furniture of sandal- and cedar-wood from the caravan traders, even the worked crimson slippers my wife wore on feast days, were all seized; there was nothing which was not taken off to the Royal Treasury; only the lives of my wife, Anna, and my son were spared.

  But before long this king got himself killed by two of his sons—I praise the Lord for my own son, Tobias, for surely there can be no worse sorrow than to have a son turn against his father, as Absalom did against his father David. There came a time when I recalled the words of King David as he wept for his son. ‘O my son Absalom, O Absalom my son, my son!’

  3

  The Wednesday after her alarming slide into the bath Julia met Nicco on his way home from school. He smiled appeasingly and the thought came to her: He has been trying to find some excuse for not visiting me.

  ‘I go for my cousin to glass…’ he flapped his hands, ‘to make the glass fit.’

  After the disaster Julia Garnet had replaced the red-robed Virgin Mary back on the bedroom wall. ‘The glass-cutters, Nicco?’ Julia made the consonants explicit for him. ‘Cutters.’

  ‘I see you later?’ Nicco was looking anxious.

  Thinking of her words about him to Carlo, Julia felt remorse. She should reassure the boy—she did not want him to feel that to study English with her was so horrible. Their visit to the man with the red hat and the lunch afterwards rested warmly in her thoughts. Nicco had helped her then. ‘May I come with you?’ she volunteered.

  ‘Please,’ Nicco gave one of his smiles. Not for the first time it reminded her of Carlo and her heart jumped. And there, as if on cue, was Carlo, all smiles too and waving at her.

  ‘Ciao!’ she called across the rio, relief flooding through her that she had not, after all, alienated him. And what if Nicco were there? She was not ashamed of her friendship with the boy. ‘We’re off for a walk, come and join us!’ And he came across the bridge with his long stride.