Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  The discovery made her excited. It fed a partial wish, emerging out of her increasingly complex feelings about Carlo, to think—while at the same time dreading to think—the worst of him. He had, after all, charmed her with the tale of the old man and his son and the angel, assuring her of its sacred provenance. And she had been suspicious. Rightly so, she reminded herself now as she leaned back in her chair on the balcony, sipping the milkless tea. For Carlo had bamboozled her, that was it (almost she savoured the word). Bamboozled and seduced her with his religion and its cheap trumpery.

  It had been Julia Garnet’s habit, during her years of teaching history at St Barnabas and St James, to intersperse her lessons with occasional stories whose purpose, she would have asserted if asked, was to point up to the children some useful life principle. That it was probable that no single part of any of the intended moral content of her anecdotes stuck in the minds of her listeners was not a consideration which had deterred her, having little interest in what did or did not attach to the minds of those she taught. Very likely, if the truth be told, she introduced the stories to relieve her own boredom—although that was not an explanation she would have naturally accepted either.

  One of her favourite stories of this kind she had used to bring out during her teaching of nineteenth-century social reform. It concerned the MP Samuel Plimsoll who, discovering that hapless sailors were, to increase profits, being carried in ships that sank dangerously beneath the water line, enacted a violent rage out of a cool awareness of the facts the better to ensure adequate safety measures be passed through parliament. ‘You see,’ Miss Garnet had explained to her indifferent pupils, ‘everything is capable of being made objective. Plimsoll’s “anger” gave us the Plimsoll Line!’ At which point she would herself enact a kind of indulgent beam around the classroom.

  She might have added that, generally, anger has a slenderer connection with objectivity; for even in those days she was dimly aware that human beings tend to shy away from self-scrutiny. Perhaps it was this story, for which she had formed, over the years, an affection, or the years of teaching history which had given her a taste for truth. In any case it enabled her now, privately on her balcony overlooking the back of the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele, to own that it wasn’t fair to suggest that Carlo had ‘bamboozled’ her. If there was any ‘bamboozling’ it had been done to and by herself. Nor was it true that she believed his was a religion of trumpery. There was the marble Virgin she had kissed, and the honeycombed silence of St Mark’s to say otherwise; and there was the Archangel, the smiling and enigmatic Raphael.

  The package contained another book, a slight, red volume. She picked it up and read, Apocrypha: Authorised (King James) Version. Inside, the same inscription as she had read in the black Bible. Translated out of the original tongues…The inscription finished, Appointed to be read in Churches.

  She looked further inside. Esdras I. Esdras II, Tobit. So it was there. An Apocryphal book! But what did that mean? Surely ‘apocryphal’ meant something false? The inscription declared it ‘appointed to be read in churches’ so in the seventeenth century it was considered a holy book. Or at least not, she surmised, an unholy one.

  Despite the sun her shoulders had become cold on the balcony and the teapot was empty. She carried her tray of things inside.

  As a child Julia had been taught to keep the most desirable of her few treats back until all duties had been discharged. It was a habit she had seen no point in unlearning and she succumbed to it now as she washed up her cup and plate, drying them on the cloth, on which the Statue of Liberty was depicted, brought by one of Signora Mignelli’s tenants as a gift from New York.

  This tea towel always induced in her a slight sensation of guilt. Where she had arrived in Venice empty-handed, the unknown American had had the foresight—like the scarlet-robed Magi she had encountered on her own arrival—to come bearing gifts.

  Her own deficiency made her now ashamed. It was an awful arrogance she now saw, polishing the spoon and knife with a thoroughness as if to make up for other defects, imagining that somehow being English was honour enough to bring to another’s household. How absurd, how absurd we humans are, she thought, settling herself on the sofa with her spectacles.

  * * *

  It was many years since Julia Garnet had so much as opened a Bible. As part of her life-long rebellion against her father, even at St Barnabas and St James she had refused to take assembly on grounds of ‘principle’. But now her ‘principles’ had begun to take on for her an altogether different aspect—like old photographs, in which the subjects posed and squinted, oblivious to the embarrassing picture they were recording for posterity.

  What would her old Party friends think, she wondered as she began to find her way through the small print and numbered verses of the red-covered book to ‘Tobit’. It amused her to notice that what she was engaged on felt very like sacrilege.

  The names of the places were what struck her first: Thisbe; Nineveh; Raghes; Media; Assyria. Mysterious names, redolent of flamboyant arcaneries. The laws of the Medes and the Versions. Were these the same Assyrians who came down like a wolf on the fold? Barbaric people, obviously. But there was a brio about them: according to the poet, weren’t their cohorts gleaming with purple and gold?

  And the story: I, Tobit, have walked all the days of my life in the ways of truth and justice and I did many thousand alms deeds to my brethren…

  But, thought Julia Garnet, surely there is some mistake? For the man sounded, well, so full of his own rectitude—too full, surely, to be quite as holy as his words seemed to claim. The pale sun shone through the window, lighting up the tiny print as she read on.

  It was the same story she had gleaned from the organ-loft panels. But the bare account in the church pamphlet gave little sense of the strange poetry of the tale of Tobit, the Jewish exile, taken forcibly out of Israel by the Assyrians in spite of his extreme righteousness; and his son, Tobias, who is accompanied on a journey to restore the family fortunes by none other than the Angel Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who go in and out before the Lord.

  Michael, Gabriel, Raphael—who, then, are the other four? wondered Julia, putting down the book for her eyes had grown tired from the small print.

  During the days of her prowlings she had entered one of the many small shops which specialise in Venetian paper and had bought a notebook with a blue-marbled cover. Her original intention had been to note down historical details of Venice, hoping to restore some of her shattered equanimity with the subject which had sustained her for so many years. But the staple of her professional life, her historical mind, seemed also to have suffered from the trauma of Carlo: the memory of the Reverend Crystal, lying abandoned on the floor of the chapel where she and Carlo had first met, acted as a recurrent block to her intentions. So far then, the thick cream pages had remained blank. But now, seeing the blue-marbled book to hand, she picked up a pencil, opened the book and wrote, Who are the seven angels? Michael, Gabriel, Raphael. After a while she remembered Uriel from Paradise Lost and added his name. Find out names of other three.

  * * *

  ‘The architect in charge of the works is Venetian, of course,’ Sarah said, ‘and everything, absolutely everything must be referred to the two Soprintendenti: one for monuments and one for painting. It’s a pain!’

  Julia had been disconcerted to hear from Signora Mignelli that while she was out at the post office, mailing a present to Vera (a brown-marbled notebook as a ‘thank you’ for the Bible and Apocrypha), a ‘young lady’ had called asking for her. Julia’s nerve for socialising had been blasted. But she had made a point before of suggesting Sarah bring her brother to tea. It was impolite not to follow up the invitation. In any case they very likely wouldn’t come.

  To her dismay, however, the twins had come the very next afternoon as she was sitting on her balcony, and now they were sitting there too, with the enamel teapot doing service.

  The conversation had been stilted. Julia
had asked rather tentatively about the restoration, but only Sarah had answered. Julia, trying to include the mute twin, asked, ‘So, Toby, you’re the mosaicist? It’s the floor then, that’s your department?’ She did not want to mention that it was Carlo who had told her.

  But Toby only said, ‘Yeah. I need some cigarettes,’ and got up and abruptly left the two of them on the balcony.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ his sister said, watching him cross the campo. ‘He’s terribly moody. Love does that.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Julia felt perturbed. Over the past days she had found her mind returning to the angel whose name means ‘God’s healing’. She had wanted to thank Toby for the introduction to the stone effigy which presided so beatifically over the chapel. A young man in love was outside her imaginative reach and yet her own condition made her tender towards another sufferer. A sudden image of Carlo’s hand, across the table at the restaurant by the Arsenale, made her ask, ‘Is it a local girl?’

  ‘No. He expected to hear from her on Valentine’s Day and didn’t. He’s like a bear with a sore head.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Almost Julia felt it was her fault that Toby’s girl had not written to him. She had forgotten about valentines: she had had little cause in her life to remember them.

  ‘He’ll get over it. Did you know they used to celebrate Candlemas on Valentine’s Day here?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m very ignorant about the Church.’ Julia, casting about for conversational topics, had told the twins about the service she had funked in the Angelo Raffaele. ‘I’d never heard of Candlemas.’ It was from Carlo she had learned about it—Carlo who had taught her so much—the day she had idiotically read Nicco The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck. The day that, like a fool, she had thought to interest Carlo with her pathetic account of her evening with the Cutforths!

  ‘We were made to go to church at home,’ said Sarah, pulling a face. ‘Listen, weren’t you going to tell me the story of the Guardis?’

  * * *

  Afterwards, Julia could never be sure whether she had already decided not to tell the girl the story of Tobit and his son’s journey with the disguised angel, or whether it was in response to what, looking out over the roofs of the chiesa, she suddenly saw there, that she all at once stood up saying, ‘Is it me or is it getting cold?’ and ushered her guest, quite urgently, inside.

  My nephew had got himself preferment, Cupbearer and Signatory to the new king, a valuable position and one which breeds trust. So when my nephew spoke for me the king listened; he was a bookish man and his chief fancy was to build a library to house his tablets of clay and to set up his royal observatory to plot the planets and the stars. And perhaps, too, he wished to play ‘new broom’ and define his differences from the war-loving Sennacherib.

  ‘I told him you were a little crazy, Uncle,’ my nephew obligingly explained. ‘You can return to your home but you must undertake to live by Assyrian law. When in Assyria, remember…?’ and he smiled in that provoking way the young have when they are in a position to patronise one who has once played the taws on their backside.

  Our home had nothing left in it but the bare stone it was made of but it seemed to me a haven after the cave I had been sharing with the ravens and the vermin. It was the feast of Pentecost when I returned. The Rib had got together a great spread to celebrate, which she was anxious my sister’s boy share with us. But the lad was chary of being seen to be too thick with a subversive like me—I didn’t blame him for that: we each have our own field to harrow—and claimed some prior engagement. So I said to my son, Tobias, ‘Go out and find some poor person and bring him here in your cousin’s place—we should share our good fortune with those less fortunate.’

  I caught the Rib casting her eyes up to the sky at this but she held her tongue, out of deference to my recent homecoming. She was about to light the candles in preparation for the feast when my son ran in to say that he had seen the dead body of one of our tribe laid out on the city walls.

  His mother made a kind of noise at the back of her mouth and then sat saying nothing, but looking the way women do when they have an opinion they are not going to express openly. I don’t know what they think those pointed stares are if not opinions deprived of words? But the Rib knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop me because when I got up ready to go out she dropped at once to her knees. To some it might have looked like piety; only I knew it was her way of making a reproach!

  The man had been strangled. I remember the body now as if it were yesterday: a thin man, in a dirty striped tunic, with a face like a wolf—the long features purple and grey from suffocation. I dragged him by his two scrawny arms through the streets and lugged the body up to our upper room, which didn’t find favour with the Rib either—she was proud of that room where the few remaining bits or her dowry-linen were stored and the use of it to house a corpse was about as far from her wishes as you could reach to. After sundown I carried the corpse to a spot by the city wall which is rarely visited, which is why the wild dogs like it.

  The corpse was stiffening and the limbs would not go easily into the grave I had scraped out of the ground so I was afraid I would have to break one of the arms. It comes to me in dreams at times, that unyielding arm. The clay was so hard and unforgiving a part of me longed to leave the wretched thing there to the dogs and the broad-winged carrion birds which hover over the city for carnage. But I thought of the exile and how my tribe had neglected the ways of the Lord: I had determined to dedicate my life to doing what was right.

  When I returned home the neighbours had got wind of what I had been up to and made it apparent that they wanted nothing to do with me. My person was a reproach to them and, worried they might pick up my dangerous taint and get into trouble with the authorities, they had to ensure their own safety with distance. I was polluted from corpse-handling anyway, so I sat out by myself awhile.

  To tell you the truth it wasn’t merely the grave-pollution which kept me away from the house: I didn’t want to go in and face the Rib. I knew she feared the neighbors’ talk—after all it had led before to the threat of death—and I knew it would be tears—and after the tears the accusations. This wasn’t what she was born to, not what her father and mother had meant for her—and so forth in the way of women. But I did not blame her; it was not an easy life I had given her.

  I must have fallen asleep by our courtyard wall for the next thing I knew I heard the birds start up with their dawn chorus. I opened my eyes, gummed with sleep, and saw some sparrows twittering in the purple creeper which half-holds our wall together. Pretty things, I thought. And then one of the little devils shat on me: shat right into my eye!

  The birdshit was warm and sticky and stung like ant’s gall. I cried out and the Rib, who had been out searching for me, came running. She took me indoors and rinsed my eyes and put warm cloths over them. But although the pain abated the dung had formed a white film over my eyes. From that day onwards I was blind.

  4

  It was weeks since Julia had seen the twins. A cough, picked up during the directionless roaming in the February fogs, had first become persistent and then turned to bronchitis until pneumonia had threatened.

  Signora Mignelli, noticing that her tenant’s tall friend had ceased to appear, had at first been tactful. Ignorant of the theories of modern psychology the Signora nevertheless came from a tradition which accepted a connection between emotional and physical health. ‘It is the heart which suffers,’ she had murmured to her sister, who had been interested in the progress of the elderly spinster’s relazione amorosa. Only when the Signora had begun to hear the cough across the campo had she intervened and a young man in a leather jacket with a stethoscope had been summoned.

  Julia Garnet had been too unwell to more than register how youthful the Signora’s dottore seemed. The cough had first annoyed and then fatigued her, and on his orders she took, with something like relief, to the bed with the high, carved bed-head.

  The days in bed, during which Signora Mi
gnelli had insisted on taking over the shopping and cooking, had permitted many reveries. Julia read a little, slept a great deal, and woke to meandering daydreams in which the intricate carvings on the bed-head played a part. The medicine the leather-jacketed dottore had prescribed to soothe the cough perhaps contained some opiate. Certainly it was the case that weird shapes detached themselves from the carvings and undulated dragonlike through her mind. The dragons reminded her of the paintings she had seen with Carlo—in particular one by Carpaccio, of the shock-haired, youthful St George, became interchanged with the face of the young doctor.

  It was brooding on St George and the look of unswerving dedication with which the painter had endowed him as the boyish saint prepares to slay his dragon, that Julia Garnet—her fever-crowded consciousness becoming still—came up with a thought.

  When the body is delicate ideas, resisted by the robuster conditions of health, gain ingress and lay down invisible foundations. The notion which had come to Julia Garnet, as she lay looking at her fingers twisting the fringe of the pearl-white coverlet (which, she had learned, during the course of the Signora Mignelli’s care of her, was a survivor of the Signora’s once extensive dowry), was that there existed in life two kinds of people: those who tangled with their fate, who took issue with what life brought them, who made, in short, waves, and those who bore their circumstance, taking life’s meaning from what came to them, rather than what they wrested from it.

  It seemed to her, lying watching the bars of the sun cross the white walls and making them jump from side to side as she tried the child’s experiment of winking alternate eyes, that from her limited knowledge St George, Florence Nightingale and Old Tobit fell into the first class, while Socrates, Jane Austen and Tobias fell into the second. Jesus of Nazareth, she decided after further contemplation, belonged to both categories—and so possibly did Karl Marx.