Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

Gravely, Carlo bowed at the pair of them, the slight grey-haired woman and the gold-skinned youth at her side.

  ‘This is my friend Nicco,’ Julia Garnet explained, proud that she was the one whose position demanded introductions, ‘and this,’ she turned towards the tall, silver-haired man, ‘is my friend Carlo.’

  Julia Garnet’s natural diffidence had not fostered in her habits of perspicacity but now, looking at Nicco, she saw that he had an awkward look on his face. And looking back at Carlo she observed that he also looked different.

  ‘The glass-cutters,’ she explained brightly, ‘we are off to the glass-cutters, Nicco and I,’ and not knowing why she flushed.

  But Nicco surprised her. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I go later,’ and pushing behind her, rather rudely she couldn’t help feeling, he ran off along the water-side.

  ‘Well, whatever was that about?’ Julia Garnet turned to her friend, ready to share an adult’s humorous incomprehension at the doings of a quixotic child; but Carlo was watching the boy intently as he ran over the bridge.

  When intuition finally strikes the unintuitive it can be blinding: Julia Garnet had been taken, during one of her visits to the Accademia, by a painting from one of the many minor masters whose works fill the art collections of Italy. The painting was of St Paul on the road to Damascus and what had forced itself onto her newly awakened sensibilities was the look of puzzlement and fear on the savagely enlightened face of the tentmaker. Had she been in a position to observe herself, she might have seen just such a look on her own face now. But only the Angel Raphael, looking down from his position on the chiesa, could have seen the corresponding flash of terror across her heart.

  Intuition is also a prompt of memory. Out of her memory, clear and unprocessed, came the recollection of the day she had gone with Nicco to the glass-cutters. A man. A man had come out as she had been worrying about paying for the picture, fussing with the Italian currency. The man and Nicco had collided and there had been a moment when Nicco had spoken with agitation, as she heard it now in memory, before the man had walked away. The man, tall and silver-haired, she suddenly perceived was Carlo, and in a moment of painful understanding she saw, watching his hungry, yearning look after the retreating Nicco, that she had been the unwitting dupe of his wish to find the boy who had accompanied her that day. It was not her whom Carlo had wanted to befriend—it was Nicco.

  She stood, dumbly unprepared by anything in her previous life for the awful moment of negative intimacy which the recognition brought. And Carlo stood too, aware, as the high red spots on his cheekbones signalled, that something momentous had occurred to his companion. But they were civilised people, Carlo and Julia Garnet, and the sharp rent which had appeared in the fabric of their acquaintance was left unremarked between them.

  Carlo spoke first. ‘A concert tonight…they are playing Albinoni?’ His eyes did not look at her directly.

  ‘Thanks, I think I’ll stay in. I’m a bit tired.’ So lame the words came out; it was all she could do to refrain from crying aloud.

  He walked back with her to the apartment, full of the usual courtesies. But his smile was strained. At the door of the apartment he dropped her with a pleasantry—his eyes cold and repelling; she had to stop herself from calling after him.

  She did not, however, call after him. Instead she sat at the kitchen table until it grew dark.

  * * *

  Many years ago Julia Garnet, who was blessed with a retentive memory, read somewhere these lines.

  Remember this: those who give you life may take it back, and in the taking take from you more than they gave.

  She did not recall the source but she recalled, quite distinctly, the sensation with which she read the words. She had known that she did not understand them but, obscurely, they had frightened her.

  During the days after what she termed to herself ‘the discovery’ the forgotten author’s words came back to her, relentlessly keeping pace with her steps as she walked the streets of Venice.

  She had lived most of her life alone. Her mother had borne her late in life and Julia believed that that, and the strain of trying to please her tyrannical father, had probably contributed to her mother’s early death. When her mother died, a few weeks after her sixtieth birthday, Julia was not quite fifteen.

  She had escaped from her father as soon as she could, going to Girton College, Cambridge on a scholarship. Although he had tried to make her departure from the family home as unpleasant as possible, there was not much he could do to prevent it and once away from him a part of her had felt she could never again face living with another man. There had been female friends, such as Vera, and there had been Harriet whom, she now concluded, pounding the streets, she had not treated as well as she could have done. Harriet had been more than a friend; but, blindly, she had taken Harriet for granted. Yet she had loved Harriet, she now knew, and she knew it because she had learned to love someone else.

  If you spend most of your life alone often you do not know that you are lonely. It was not until ‘the discovery’ that Julia Garnet knew that she was lonely and that she had been so for most of her life. She had known Carlo for less than five weeks and yet it was as if he acted as a major artery to her heart.

  It was the mystery of this which partly forced her out onto the streets as if the puzzle of her swift and intense involvement with this man might be solved by the most thoroughgoing of external explorations. She woke early and walked, avoiding any area where she might encounter anyone she knew, until she found some anonymous-seeming bar, where she drank coffee amid men in woollen hats who reminded her of the glass-cutter, the man with the red hat who, like a figure in some child’s tale, seemed to be gate-keeper to new experience.

  The reminder of the first meeting with Carlo did not bother her; even, she found, she began to hanker after it. She strained to recover what he had been wearing. Was it his dark grey coat? (She could almost swear to his red scarf—or had the red of the glass-cutter’s hat become transposed in her mind?) Driven by a hungry desire to garner every scrap of time spent with him, she combed her memory for forgotten moments: the time he bought her an ice cream; the aspirin he had offered her when she had complained of a mild headache; the water-taxi home when she was tired. Had all the trouble then been merely towards establishing a connection with Nicco? For the discovery that her friend’s proclivities were not for women had not detracted one jot from her own feelings.

  At first she had been horrified, revolted even. ‘Disgusting!’ she had spat angrily when finally she had dully shifted her weight off to bed that first night. And she had lain, fully clothed, in the dark holding her sides. But love is notorious for its refusal to observe prejudice and gradually the eyes of Carlo, as she had last seen him, reinstated themselves. They no longer seemed cold. Sad, yes, she was sure that what she had seen was sadness, sadness and dismay. Did he miss her at all? Her heart hurt when she thought of him and she thought of him most minutes of most hours of most days.

  Once on her wanderings she had caught sight of the Cut-forths, arm in arm, Cynthia looking in a furrier’s window—he comfortably lighting one of his perpetual little cheroots—and she had drawn back into the shadow of an alley. To witness such linked and homely familiarity (for the strongest impression she had carried with her from the Gritti was of the Cutforths’ close and, somehow, practical intimacy) was starkly painful. Seeing them so unquestioningly together, it was as if the polite pair had put their hands on their spare hips and jeered at her uncoupled state.

  In an effort to avoid all known contacts she roamed far from her usual patch. One day, penetrating to the Arsenale, the fortified area where Venice built its ships, forgetting that this is where she and Carlo had drunk the flat prosecco, she encountered a middle-aged woman sitting beside one of the lions which guard the entrance of the old archway. Caught by something in the woman’s expression Julia stopped by the lion. ‘Do you speak English?’

  The woman turned and Julia saw that tears were in her
eyes. ‘If I speak anything.’

  Love—even for what we cannot have—can make us brave. ‘Have you lost somebody?’ Julia Garnet asked.

  But the woman only gave a half-groan and Julia, observing the body of a cat floating in the canal, was reminded of Stella and walked on.

  Once, in another quarter of the city, she fetched up in the bar where the gondoliers meet, to which Carlo had joked about bringing her. Maybe he would be there? The lurch in her heart made her dizzy and she ordered a brandy. It was half-ten in the morning and the bartender spoke admiringly. ‘Brandy for the Signora?’ After that she walked with a lift in her step for an hour or so until the black pit opened again and she and all she ever possessed fell once more into it.

  Many days passed like this and at night she hardly slept. I suppose I am having what is known as a nervous breakdown, thought Julia Garnet.

  During all this time she heard nothing from Carlo or from Nicco. Poor Nicco! For she found she had no wish to see him, was indeed violently angry with the boy who had done no more than attract the desire, unasked, of the man she had so foolishly come to love. More than love, she adored him. With no other witness to her grief she spoke aloud one day to the red-robed Madonna with the grave child whose picture she had reinstated on her bedroom wall. ‘I adore you, I adore you.’

  She was conscious of a feeling of shame that these ardent words had as their object not the so-called mother of God but an ageing Italian paedophile. But the Virgin’s almond eyes looked back unreproving and a fugitive notion entered Julia Garnet’s thoughts. Maybe, she formed the words to herself, maybe she doesn’t mind?—and the idea was curiously reassuring.

  Perhaps it was this reassurance which determined Julia to do what she had so far avoided and return to the glimmering domes of St Mark’s.

  There was a cold wind as she marched back down the Calle Lunga and she pulled down the veil of Harriet’s hat. Its fine mesh made a protection against the blast on her face and she found there was a further comfort in it: for behind her veil she could look out at passers-by without herself being scrutinised. Harriet! What would Harriet have made of her friend falling so passionately and, it must be said, so unsuitably in love at this time in her life? It was ironic when you thought how it was she who had always been charging Harriet with unsuitability. Had Harriet ever been in love? she wondered, crossing the bridge where the view of the Salute’s bubble domes held out the promise of the basilica’s domes to come. She would not now be surprised to learn that there had been a secret lover in Harriet’s life. There was the question over the dyed hair and her companion had displayed certain other signs: a tendency to drink too much sherry; a penchant for unusual hats and handbags; a taste for romantic fiction. She had mocked Harriet’s Mills & Boon library books. The bitterness of the wind off the Alps made tangible for her now the bitterness of her own remorse. Under the guise of ‘common sense’ she had cut Harriet ‘down to size’, a hideous turn of phrase, as she now saw it. Shuddering at her own deficiencies, as much as at the February winds, she came once more to the edge of the Piazza.

  And there it was—more powerful than in memory—the big-bellied roofs the colour of opaque crystal, the wings of the angels gleaming as they mounted ever upwards to the cloud-packed sky.

  Why, this is love too, thought Julia Garnet.

  Inside, she felt suddenly as if the hugeness of the interior had abated, transmuted rather, into a great cave of golden kindness in which she was no longer alien but an accepted presence. The door to the little side chapel was closed and it was with a sense of relief that she turned to the transept beside it. A notice read ‘For Confessions Only’ and really not meaning to, she stepped up to the altar intending only to look.

  But what a shock! There in a wooden box sat a little, shrunken figure in purple. Only a priest waiting for confession after all, but she fell back, startled, into the main body of the basilica.

  The crowd was processing slowly round between roped corridors. Carpets were laid over the marble floors, whose whirled geometric shapes plunged and swooped, revealing centuries of subsidence. The chairs on which she had sat for Vespers were all packed away.

  Julia Garnet stopped by the sign to the treasury and sat down on the base of a column beneath a long, curved mosaic of a bald saint. The unlooked-for encounter with the priest had disturbed her gingerly recovering equilibrium. Thoughts of all her past petty spitefulnesses to Harriet came flooding back. It might be a relief to confess her faults but she certainly did not want to confess them to an ugly puppety man in a coffin-like box. She sat on the column base in the golden gloom amid the hushed shuffle and the sense of her despair and loss and her own ultimate irrelevance.

  * * *

  A movement at the edge of her peripheral vision made her turn. High up and towards a roped-off area—for parts of the cathedral were closed off to the shuffling visitors—a small bird had somehow penetrated the interior and was flitting from carved ledge to ledge.

  Julia, watching its speckled brownness, felt a school-marmish urge to reprove the bird for its unauthorised entry into the famous church. But on the heels of the school-marmishness followed another impulse: a kind of respectful admiration for the audacity of the thing.

  As she watched, the sparrow landed on a carved figure in the marble. A face, the Madonna’s face, and in her arms a child. An intense desire to approach closer to the face beset Julia Garnet and she did a thing she had never before done in her life: she defied an implicit order and ducked under the prohibiting rope.

  No one was about. It was towards the end of the day and the cathedral was preparing to close. The long silver lamps were slowly being switched off. Julia’s eyes, grown accustomed to the dimness, made out a low stool at the feet of the carving. Removing her shoes she stepped upon it in stockinged feet and stretching up she kissed the marble Madonna’s hand.

  * * *

  That night Julia Garnet slept without pursuant dreams. When she woke sun had made its way through the edges of the shutters and was painting oblique bars upon the walls. Going out onto the balcony she felt it warm her shoulders. Although only February the air carried traces of Spring.

  She set a pan of water to boil while she went down to look for post. And yes, there was a package on the radiator-shelf. Signora Mignelli must have been in already. Julia took it upstairs before making her tea in the enamel pot.

  There was no milk but the scalding tea was reviving and there was a piece of stale almond cake too, which she took pleasure in dunking in the golden liquid. Her father would have disapproved.

  ‘Bloody old bastard!’ Julia Garnet spoke aloud. She tidied up her breakfast things, sprinkling the crumbs over the balcony for the birds, before opening the package.

  Vera Kessel had not been too surprised when her friend had written asking if she would be good enough to purchase and send on to her a King James Bible. The tone of the letter had been sufficiently like what Vera had known of her old friend not to be too alarmed at the content. It must be the 1611 translation, the letter had specified. No other version will do. And I absolutely do not want (this last had been underlined) one of those editions which sickly everything over with a pale cast of modernity. Definitely no New English rubbish, please!

  Vera, who followed the vaguest indication of another’s needs as if carrying out a legal instruction, had spent her day off searching out an Authorised Bible. Dyed-in-the-wool Socialist that she was, an acute observer might have detected that there was a kind of frisson attached to this enterprise. It was not a thought which Vera herself would have recognised but it was rather as if her old friend had suddenly requested she search out for her seamy or pornographic literature.

  I am sending you The Apocrypha as well, she had written. I thought I might as well send you the whole damn boiling—since you seem to be immersed in Holy writs. This last was Vera’s idea of a joke, and out of gratitude for her friend’s efforts Julia afforded it an indulgent smile. It had been generous of Vera to give up her day, alt
hough, Julia noted, she had been unable to resist mentioning the fact in her letter.

  It is such a trial, these days, getting about in Central London but luckily I had a day off and was able to combine your book search with a visit to the National Gallery.

  A picture postcard accompanied the letter. A Titian portrait: the man with a blue sleeve. He stared out, across the slashed, billowing blue silk, with unblinking confidence at Julia. How funny! Vera, ardent Socialist that she was, had clearly responded to the aristocratic hauteur of the man. People, she was beginning to see, were made up of different bits. The portrait reminded Julia of the ‘foxy-whiskered gentleman’, Jemima Puddle-duck’s attentive suitor who, she recognised suddenly, she had, as a child, found sexually attractive. Maybe it was some dim awareness of this that had made her hide the book from Carlo the day he called and just missed Nicco—when he had seemed so angry with her. Of course she knew now why.

  Her stomach plunged and she pushed her mind back to Vera. On the back of the card Vera had written, To remind you of the real world. ‘Real’ was underlined with three stripes of Biro.

  Oh dear, thought Julia pouring herself another cup of straw-coloured tea. What is, after all, the real world? I wish I knew.

  The padded envelope yielded a dense black-bound book with gold-blocked letters: The Holy Bible. The fly leaf announced that it was Translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty’s special command. Good old Vera. She was ‘diligent’ too. She really shouldn’t mock a friend who carried out one’s wishes with such exemplary exactitude.

  Turning the rice-paper thin page to The names and order of all the books of the Old and New Testament Julia scanned the fine-printed list. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers…these, of course she knew. But there were others, half registered, less familiar, Joshua, Esther, Ezra, and some she had never heard of, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah. But of Tobit there was no sign.

  There! She knew she had been right. The Book of Tobit was some Catholic extravagance. It didn’t even feature in the Protestant Bible!