Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  Before she left, Julia said, ‘Does he know anything about the panel, your architect?’

  But this for some reason appeared to annoy the girl for her voice became sharp again. ‘Not at all. It’s nothing to do with him—not his department!’

  * * *

  Eating broad beans on the balcony alone Julia thought about the visit. Sarah was quite unlike the children she had taught (and really one thought of her as a child!) but, then, what did she know about it? Her life had been spent in a rigid method of dealing out dead fictions to children who would hardly care if she herself were dead! How could she claim to know what they were like? In that split second which would live in her memory for ever, when she had seen another kind of fiction die and had stared in the face of a living truth (the truth about Carlo), she had descended into hell. But, like the stars which, it is said, can be seen from the deepest pits even at noon, she had seen something else from that ‘hell’: the faintest light which illuminated something beyond her own pain. Dimly now, by that light, she had a fleet vision of why Carlo was as he was: Nicco was beautiful to him for Nicco was life. No doubt it was wrong of Carlo to desire to use the boy’s beauty for his own perverse ends but at least he saw and responded to it. Whereas she…shutting her eyes to the naturalness of children she had pressed on with her formulaic sense of what was right and wrong—very like old Tobit religiously burying his dead, eternally insisting on his own righteousness. Opening her notebook she wrote: Dogs lead the blind. Old Tobit is ‘blind’ because he doesn’t see the limitations of his own values. (Look how he treats his wife when she is working her fingers to the bone for him. He doesn’t ‘see’ her!)

  She had taken her dish inside and rinsed and wiped it dry before going back out onto the balcony, with a glass of brandy, to add: All that burying of the dead—tunnel vision!

  * * *

  ‘Aldo knows your friend,’ Sarah called down a few days later from her place on the scaffolding platform and even before she spoke the name the crunch in Julia’s chest presaged who it would be. ‘Carlo Antonini! He was there. Said to say “Ciao” to you. He called by here once. He seems to know all about the chapel.’

  ‘Yes,’ Julia called up. ‘He would.’ But her voice was too faint to reach the girl on the roof.

  ‘Come up if you like!’

  But Julia did not like. The thought of the scaffolding was no longer tempting. She wanted to return to the chapel’s still interior—the haunt of Sarah’s brother, Toby, and the bats. The enigmatic wooden panel was there too—wrapped in a blanket like those in the school sick-room. An image of a sleeping child floated into her mind.

  The door of the chapel opened and Toby, squinting into the sun, came out.

  ‘Hi!’ He looked worried. The girl still, she guessed.

  Compassion made her return in kind. ‘Oh, hi Toby! Are you working?’

  ‘Yeah. Fancy a look?’ She had hoped he might ask.

  He held the door for her and passing him she smelled sweat from his armpit. It was a novel sensation, mildly erotic, she realised, and she did not even flush at the thought.

  Inside the chapel was lit with the lamp she had seen before but now two additional halogen beams were directed from the scaffolding behind the altar onto the damaged floor. Toby beside her, oddly intimate in the strange light, pointed out the tessarae-less patches of floor like gaping gums void of teeth, the effect of the years of subsidence and the water’s repeated depredations. How restful it must be to love stone and glass like that. But she was forgetting, he loved flesh and blood too. From the tiny intact areas of the mosaic she could just make out the same sweeping geometric patterns she had seen at St Mark’s—but on the section where he was working there were leaves and what looked like an animal’s shape.

  ‘It’s a bit of a jigsaw at the moment,’ Toby said, ‘but if you can see’—pointing—‘that part’s a fish.’ Also, why the fish? she had written in her notebook. Fish, dog, man, angel—these seem to be different levels of evolution?

  ‘There’s a fish in the Tobias story, as well as the dog.’

  ‘Oh yeah, right! I’d wondered about Jonah’s whale.’

  Jonah, the wandering prophet, reminded her too much of her father. ‘He was a bit of a misery, wasn’t he?’ But then, fair’s fair, living in the belly of a whale must give one a different point of view. In the beginning, according to the Bible, the world was parcelled out—sea, earth and air—and above the air the ethereal firmament, the element of the angels.

  ‘What do you think of the angel on the panel?’ she asked turning to him suddenly, and long afterwards she remembered his reply—almost as if he had meant to say something else.

  ‘I think…he must be the nearest thing to heaven I’ll ever see on earth!’

  I, Tobit, who walked from the shores of Lake Galilee to Jerusalem, from Kedesh to Nineveh, from Nineveh to Raghes in Media, I who had always been proud of my body’s strength, was now thrown into impotent inaction. After I became blind I could no longer provide for our family and the Rib had to take on manual work—laundering, sewing and the like—for us to live. For me that was worse than the blindness.

  She could not hide from me her disgruntlement. Not that she minded work—she was born with her sleeves rolled up. But women can be cats and the other women made her feel our fall—we who had once been part of the king’s household.

  It made difficulties between us, who had before known only the usual grumbles and discontents of married couples; I became suspicious-minded and she quarrelsome. I resented her having to work and she resented my resentment. But in time she became quite a noted laundress in the locality and began to take pride in her work.

  One day a wealthy widow gave her a kid-goat over and above what she was owed as wages. I heard the creature bleating and not knowing how we had come by such wealth leaped to the conclusion that she or the boy had stolen it. I wasn’t tactful in my enquiries but accused her of theft straight out—that is what happens when bad feeling builds between a couple: reproaches stick like burrs. That was the lowest ebb in the tide of our life together.

  In spite of my blindness she shook me by the shoulders and screamed, ‘It was a gift—a gift from a customer, for my work—because I work hard, believe it or not! What do you think of me, accusing your own wife of theft? Who do you think you are? Don’t you think I can see through you? What price your famous alms-giving and good works now, you self-pitying, self-important, self-righteous fool?’

  Night after night that terrible list of names played in my head until I began to suppose I would be better off dead. I spent the night by the courtyard wall again, and this time my wife did not come to find me. This decided me: I who had done so much, had given alms in abundance and kept faithfully the ways of the Lord, when all around me had been backsliders and renegades, yet I was treated to nothing but ignominy and slight and now, in my own household, contempt. What point was there in following the path of righteousness? I would be better off dead. But before I took leave of the world I would do my best to put my house in order—leave my family well provided, for all they thought so little of me.

  As the first sparrows began to call in the purple creeper (I still liked to hear them in spite of what they had done to me) I remembered something.

  I don’t know if you have noticed how odd a thing memory is. All those years this matter which now came into my mind had lain there unredeemed. But now, when I most needed it, an image arose before my sightless eyes of my cousin and I recalled that long ago when I was young and vigorous I had visited him in the city of Raghes and finding him in need of it had loaned him money—for in those days, when I had the king’s favour, I was a wealthy man. Raghes lies beyond the Zagros mountains in Media. In the days when I travelled as Purveyor to the king there was peace between Assyria and Media, and a hardy man could travel there and hack again within a moon.

  When the birds were well abroad and I felt the first warmth on my face, I made my way back into the house and called my son. />
  Of course, when she heard my plan, the Rib was up in arms. I think she was feeling remorse for her retort over the kid and, unhappy at my night under the dew, she was fussing about getting me hot drinks and whatevers, so at first she did not take in what I was saying. When she did I could tell, eyes or no eyes, she had paled—as she used to when I would insist on going off to bury the dead.

  But the boy was full of the plan. I see now he had been chafing, wanting to but not knowing how to help the family. When he heard that I proposed he go to Raghes to recover the debt from our relative there, he was ready to be off, getting his baggage together before you could say ‘Moses!’

  ‘Whatever are you about now, you foolish old man?’ the Rib said. (At the time I was in fact a mere fifty-eight years but I suppose it was true to say I was no spring partridge.) ‘Don’t you know he’s our only son and the way is wild and filled with robbers and Media and Assyria are no friend to one another these days. What if he never returns? You will be the death of me,’ and she began to wail and moan.

  Now I, too, was not altogether at peace at the prospect of the boy making the journey alone. True enough, at his age I had travelled across the mountains to the city by the far sea, but the times were rougher and anyway one never believes one’s son as capable as oneself. So although I told the Rib to stop her noise I began to think of how to safeguard the boy.

  ‘Look here,’ I said to him. ‘Your mother is beside herself. It would be no bad idea to take a man along with you. Let’s walk on the safe side—then she’ll be less afraid.’ (I didn’t mention to him my own mind: it’s not helpful for boys to learn fear of their fathers.)

  Now my son is a good boy, as I said, and not proud, and he went at once to the marketplace where men who would be taken for hire stand to offer their services. For many days he looked, but the men he tried were too rough for his mother or too paltry for me. I wanted a strong man to accompany my boy—there were bandit packs in the high passes which he must cross into Media. Wild men who would slit your throat soon as look at you.

  Then one day he came home with a man at his side, a tall young man, thickset and fair-headed, the boy told me when I asked my usual list of questions to discover what manner of man he was. It is unusual in this country to be fair-headed. Maybe it was this but I swear to this day I guessed there was some special thing about him. Some things you ‘know’ ahead of understanding; it was that way for me that morning.

  They came together into the courtyard. I had been sitting there—it was one of my bad days when I wasn’t even in the mood for preparing for my own departure and the boy’s mother was off seeing about some embroidery she had been commissioned to do for a local wedding. What intrigues me now is that I was not afraid. I was not even afraid of the dog, I who had so often chased off the yellow monster and his pack as I was going about my wretched business, I who had the best reasons to know how a dog will generally seek out a dead thing, did not flinch when that dog pushed his nose into my lap. Without thinking I put out my hand and stroked him. Blind as I was I could see him in my mind’s eye (and this is how I began to learn that eyes are not merely for outward affairs): a lean, neat hound with a smooth coat and intelligent ears. I don’t know what you think of dogs, but if you think about them at all you will know what I mean by ‘intelligent’ ears. Ones that communicate.

  Maybe it was the dog who put the idea of reversal into my head. The dogs I had known before had always looked towards death; it was a race between them and me and when my mishap occurred we were about quits, me and the yellow monster. This dog was the first intimation I had of a reversal—a going-about in another direction. Yes, that dog who came into our life that day with the young man whom my son had found, was a sign that things were about to turn. In your language if you spell dog backwards…well, you are not stupid, I guess, or you would not be reading this. No need, then, for me to spell it out.

  When Julia Garnet came out of the chapel she looked up. Sarah had come down off the scaffolding platform and she and her brother were inside discussing the application of a chemical compound for shifting algae. Feeling redundant, Julia had come outside again. Gulls were wheeling round the sky, and looking up she saw him again, as she had known she would.

  He was not at all obvious. There were no clear signs but up on the roof you could see, if you had a mind to it, that this was not an ordinary man. For a start he stood, without visible support, on the roof’s spine, balancing weightlessly against the air like a sail. Except that the apparition did not sway as he stood: he stood poised as if anchored by the finest gold thread to an infinite sky.

  Julia Garnet when she glimpsed him first, that day she had invited the twins to tea and had so suddenly ushered Sarah inside, had been struck by something she could not at first pin down. Later, when the girl had gone, and her hostess was washing the tea-things with the inconvenient and definitely unhygienic sponge mop (which she had intended to replace on her first day and had somehow never got around to) she received an impression of what it was that was peculiar: the figure had the transparency of the ordinary. Like a bird’s nest concealed in the flourish of a tree, he had stood against the red-tiled roof with the outlines of a man, and yet so easily passed over.

  Did the birds notice him? she had wondered that evening, stacking the saucers carefully (they were, Signora Mignelli had let her know, also relics of the wedding dowry). She had not thought to observe whether the starlings had evaded the presence she had so swiftly averted her eye from (why, then she could not quite fathom) as they roamed past the red roofs in their cloudy gangs. But seeing him again her impression now, as she watched the gulls circle the cerulean sky, was that they might fly straight through him—so silently and—what was it about him?—so unassumingly he stood there. And she understood better why on the first sighting she had felt that strange need to look away. There was something about the extremity of his self-containment which was on the edge of being terrifying. And yet it was not terror she felt now (for, all in an instant, she saw that she had spent her life keeping terror at bay). It was more like the sudden detaching, from inside her body, of a huge and cumbersome weight, which she had carried around unawares. A lightness. An acute lightness seemed to issue from where the presence rested, just above the statue of the angel, as though laughing at his own reflection in stone. It was a lightness which transmitted itself to Julia Garnet and searched through her, down to her toes. (Later she supposed that the feeling was probably somewhat akin to orgasm, were she in a position to make such a comparison.)

  And although it was inside only the splinter of a second she observed him, in that moment she knew he had been there for ever.

  II

  PASSOVER

  1

  My father is very old now and sits most of his days beneath the camphor trees scribbling at his papyrus. He does not know I have seen him at it, for when he catches me coming he slides the scroll inside the sleeve of his gown and sits plucking at his beard, waiting for me to go away. But his hearing is not as sharp as it once was—though I notice he can still hear my mother’s footfall—and there have been times I have stood right behind him at his secret writing, then turned on my heel and gone away, him none the wiser.

  But recently, when I was tiptoeing off, he heard me and asked me to stay. He was writing, he told me, the story of my journey to Media—the story which turned around our fortunes. If he died before he finished it…but here I interrupted him and told him he was not to speak like that, he was good for another ten years yet.

  I lie, of course, but he likes me to lie—with him lies are a form of respect. Very soon my father will leave us and I will grieve, for I love my father. But the news that he is writing about those events so long ago, before I met and married my wife, started a train of remembrance in me too. Funny how even the most extraordinary happenings can fade from your foremost mind, like dew before the noontime sun.

  It was the dog—Kish, as I called him—that first gave my father pause. He was unlike, m
y father said, any dog he had known before—so quick in his ways and obliging. I remember Father asked me where Kish had come from and I told him the truth, he had been with Azarias when I met him in the marketplace.

  I had been three times to choose a man who would guide me through the high plains and over the mountains to Media. Some told me they knew the way but I could tell they spun a fancy; some had honest faces, but were no better able than I was to find out such a route; and some were no-hopers, fellows who couldn’t find their way to their own graves! Again, there were the sort I liked (raffish and cheerful) but my father rejected, the ones he liked (middle-aged and sombre) but my mother found fault with and as time went by I was beginning to wonder how I was going to break it to my father that there was no way I was going to get to Raghes. Then I met Azarias.

  Azarias was standing at the edge of the marketplace by a low wall; his foot was resting on it, his arm across his knee, and he was looking. Just looking. But his look seemed to compass the distant mountains and yet take in the smallest stirring round about him. And right away he noticed me and smiled.

  There hadn’t been much smiling in our household. I am my parents’ only child and although they have always cared for me (perhaps too much?) the care has been somewhat careworn, if you take my meaning? Time has been, if you held our household’s view, the world has seemed too weary and fraught a place to bear much living in. So when I saw this smile of Azarias’s, a place deep down in me woke up and took notice. My mother has a shoulder which aches from her laundry work and when she can she will sit in the sun to ease it. Azarias’s smile was like the sun on an aching muscle in my heart: all things became possible suddenly, so that when I approached him to make my proposition I did not think, as before I might have done, He surely will not want to go with me; instead I said, ‘Could you guide me to Media perhaps?’ and he answered simply, ‘Yes.’