Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Did I tell that to you? Cynthia would kill me! She hates me gossiping!’ Charles’s demeanour did not suggest he was much trammelled by his wife’s disapproval. He leaned confidentially towards Julia. ‘He has a son—a pair I should say!—twins, would you believe, though I’ve only met one of them. He’s a fine historian too in his own right. At Stamford. We get together occasionally at conferences. Nice guy.’

  ‘But he’s a priest?’

  ‘It’s all kept hush-hush. Giuseppe refers to them as his “nephews”,’ said Charles, looking across to see the Monsignore himself almost at his elbow.

  The Monsignore gave no sign of having heard. ‘We meet again. What a pleasure for me,’ he said bowing his head at Julia. Down his tonsure-stock was a narrow border of purple silk. Like my lilac dress, she thought, regretful again that she had not worn it. ‘Charles, may I fill my glass?’ The Monsignore extended a mottled hand. ‘One of the many benefits of living in Venice is that one never has to drive and therefore one need never worry about drink. Although I feel sure anger is much more dangerous than alcohol. What do you think?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t drive.’

  ‘Neither do I!’ said the Monsignore cavalierly. ‘I don’t know why I mention it!’

  He talked on; and as he talked Julia felt her shoulders and spine unclench and settle. It was not the content of his conversation, acute as it was in every detail. It was a quality about him that made the air around him more alive—a power to improve the dispositions of those he encountered.

  The day which had begun so inauspiciously became more pleasant. Aldo, a short bald man with intelligent down-turned eyes, came over and she was able to ask about the Chapel. ‘We are most fortunate,’ he said, picking at a plate of salad. ‘A relative of Sarah’s puts up the money for this project.’

  ‘I didn’t know. Is that why she is doing the work?’ Hadn’t Sarah mentioned that the architect was keen on her?

  ‘Actually, she is also very good and very well trained with stone. But it helps, of course, that it is money from her family. And with money it is always possible here to pull strings!’

  So Sarah’s family were wealthy. ‘Did whoever it was choose the chapel, then, to restore?’

  The architect nodded so that the salad almost fell from his plate. ‘Oh yes. It is quite small and therefore possible to do with a limited sum. Of course,’ he laughed, ‘you know, that is relative!’ But he’s gay, Julia said to herself, not knowing how she knew but feeling rather proud of the observation. ‘Did you know where most of the money from England comes?’

  ‘I had supposed donations.’ Did Sarah really imagine this man fancied her?

  ‘Pizzas!’ A nearby woman wearing silk, flinched as salad from Aldo’s fork threatened her clothes. Oblivious he went on. ‘It is your Pizza Express. Many years ago the owner comes up with a bright idea. He offers a special pizza, Veneziana, and twenty pence of each pizza Veneziana sold, goes to the Venice in Peril Fund. It has already restored many, many buildings. A lot of pizza, eh!’

  Carlo and Sarah seemed to have drifted away from each other. Occasionally, she snatched a glance across at Sarah, who seemed to have the gift of making everyone laugh. Perhaps it was just an accident that they had arrived together. And Carlo was an old acquaintance of Aldo’s; it made sense.

  The conversation with the architect gave her a sense of accomplishment. Cynthia, encountering her later, after a hard-going conversation with an American woman who had married a Venetian doctor, was admiring. ‘You’re a saint. Mina is a tremendous bore. I’m fond of her but she’s one of those people one dreads meeting because she talks endlessly about her children. Have you met the mayor? You’d like him—he’s a Communist too!’

  ‘I don’t know that I’m a Communist myself any more.’

  ‘He’s also a professor of philosophy,’ said Cynthia. ‘Anyway, it’s different being a Commie here. He has a cute beard.’

  Charles came up behind Cynthia and kissed her on the neck. ‘Close thing,’ he said to Julia and winked conspiratorially.

  Julia, who guessed this referred to his indiscretion over the Monsignore and remembering that Charles had said Cynthia disliked gossip, said, ‘Charles was telling me about the Monsignore helping the Jews during the war.’

  ‘Your whiskers are tickling me, Charles! Of course that was admirable.’ Cynthia managed to sound polite about the priest but unenthusiastic. ‘Excuse me, my dear, if I leave you with my caro sposo. I must go and mix.’

  ‘Her ancestors came over on The Mayflower,’ Charles explained. ‘She thinks all Catholics are corrupt. But there’s no doubt about Giuseppe’s courage during the war. He’s on the side of life, I tell Cynth. Hence his fathering a few kids!’

  ‘Charles, why didn’t the Catholic Church help the Jews more in the war? It’s shocking isn’t it that people like the Monsignore had to do it by stealth?’

  ‘I guess because in their eyes the Jews murdered JC.’

  ‘But what about turning the other cheek? Isn’t that what he advocated?’ A memory of her father hitting her across the face. She had ‘turned’ her cheek, certainly—but in fear and shame, not Christian humility.

  ‘It wasn’t all bad. The first edition of the Talmud—you know, the compendium of rabbinical wisdom—was published here. And there’s a good story, too, about the Inquisition: they wanted Venice to step up her quota of executions which, I guess, were falling behind some of the other city states. Venice sent a message, “No heretics here!” “What about the Jews?” the Inquisition guys flagged back. And the Venetians answered that as the Jews did not believe in Christ they couldn’t be classified as heretics! I love that—the “super subtle” Venetians!’

  ‘But they still blamed the Jews for the plague?’ She was remembering the Monsignore’s story.

  ‘Hell, yes!’ Charles, the other side of drink, had now moved to elated sobriety. ‘Whole families burned. But that was true everywhere: the “dirty Jew” smear has a history as long as your arm.’

  Strangers and sojourners. Away across the water she could see the graceful twin towers of the Angelo Raffaele with the squatter tower of S. Sebastiano between. ‘He’s right, though, isn’t he, the Monsignore? We’ve stolen from them. I’d no idea the angels were Jewish. I’d always associated them with “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”—rather Pre-Raphaelite and soppy.’

  But not the Archangel Raphael. For even in her unrepenting ignorance had he not summoned her from Ealing, to her lodging by his church?

  Before she left she asked, ‘D’you think the Monsignore heard us talk about his sons?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Charles was confident. ‘Mind how you go, now—don’t slip into the lagoon!’

  But Julia, as she waited for the number 82 to take her back, was less sure. There had been a flicker in the Monsignore’s eye as he approached, which might have been humorous. Her hip hurt and her leg ached where she had twisted it. She had survived the encounter with Carlo and on the whole the occasion had been a success. But crossing the green water to the Zattere she felt herself drooping with the humidity and the fatigue of unaccustomed socialising.

  The evening continued close and later that night, still in her silk underwear, Julia lay on top of the sheets, unable to sleep. The meeting with Carlo, so successfully negotiated at the time, returned to mock her. What did he think? she wondered. How did he explain to himself the sudden cessation of intercourse between them? If he thought about it at all, for of course she was just a means to an end for him—a trivial episode in the catalogue of his life.

  Her limbs continued restless so that it seemed she had not slept at all as the sky grew first green-grey, then yellow, then rose and orange. Watching the light increase from her balcony she was aware of all that the campo had come to mean to her: the two stone wellheads; the unpromising-looking trattoria, where the fish was some of the best in Venice, to which the archangel had also kindly donated his name; the balconies with their humble adornments of washi
ng and geraniums. And, presiding over it all, the dignified, crumbling presence of the chiesa. It was as if the events of the last six months, the pity and the wonder and the terror of it all (for in her private musings she had begun to permit herself such grand phrases), had imprinted themselves upon the rich, still, old scene which lay before her and now, silently and unexcitedly, reflected back her own emotions, among the accumulated emotion of the centuries.

  Suddenly a desire to be out in the early air gripped her and she was dressed and in her shoes before she had any formed plan of where to go. Why not walk to the Ghetto in the cool and see her new habitation? It was a longish walk but her leg felt better and it was feasible while the morning was still fresh.

  Because Venice is not one island but many, laced together by a series of bridges, it is rarely possible to walk directly to any one point. The usual method is to travel by water letting the canals act as pathways. But this morning Julia wanted to walk and the facility with which she made her way, first along the familiar route by the Calle Lunga to the Accademia bridge, then through the squares of S. Stefano and past the Goldoni Theatre, where they were playing Othello, rewarded her with a sense of pride. ‘I know my way!’; in pride she almost spoke the words aloud. It was a short step from there along by the part-covered Rialto (where Antonio spat on Shylock’s gabardine), the other principal bridge which provides a crossing of the Grand Canal. Here, at the limit of familiar terrain, she stopped.

  The Monsignore had given her some advice the first time she met him. ‘Remember how to be lost in Venice—this is something I remind myself of every day!’ But this morning she felt that to be lost was not what she needed and avoiding the bridge she swerved and wove, moving quite surely, until she came out at the church of the Apostles, by the beginnings of the Strada Nuova, the only dull street in Venice.

  The bells in the Apostoli’s tower were tolling. Six o’clock. No one was about except a tramp with a yellow-braided naval cap. During her winter wanderings Julia had seen him often, lying with his brown paper bags in the shelter of the long arcade of the Doge’s Palace. An old doge returned to a former stamping ground, she had fantasised, admiring the man’s fortitude in the freezing cold. And then, suddenly, he had disappeared, and vaguely she had wondered about him. So these were his summer quarters.

  The Strada Nuova, where the Venetians do their shopping, is usually the busiest street in Venice. A solitary man with a brush was out, washing the patch in front of his shoe shop, perhaps Signora Mignelli’s second cousin out of the closet? Not a soul otherwise. Past shuttered shops, past churches, arches, pointed Gothic windows, she walked on in the direction of the Ghetto until she came to a place where she halted by the head of a woman over a high, carved, peeling door. Previously she had come to Sarah’s by the vaporetto; she was lost.

  Except for the birds it was utterly quiet. She had not heard such singing before in Venice and looking up to identify a host of agile sparrows, popping in and out of the tangled ivy, she read the old Venetian script: Calle Gheto Novissimo. She had found it.

  She followed the calle down to a wooden bridge. On either side of the narrow canal, washing lines stretched between the high buildings and looking down she saw knickers, petticoats, jumpers, overalls, perfectly reflected in the dull green water. Boats covered in tarpaulins, roped and tied across like parcels, were moored along the buildings’ weedy sides.

  Julia crossed the bridge and ducked to pass under a low wooden lintel and through the dark sotoportego. She came out into the campo, which had once been the centre of the old Ghetto. Pigeons were bathing in the water of a dripping pump; in the intense quiet, only birdsong.

  Why is it as a race they have been so much persecuted? Julia pondered, watching the pigeons preen their feathers in the water. Is it because people are made uncomfortable by their certainty? Counting the trees (nine) which contributed to the peaceful air of the place, she thought again of Old Tobit, brutally uprooted and marched off from his home in Samaria, to Assyria where he and his tribe, and the other nine tribes of Israel, disappeared, along with their kingdom, for all time. That was a holocaust too, though so long ago that no one thought about it any more.

  A cat who had been watching the pigeons strolled over, wrapping itself round her legs. Reminded of Stella she bent to caress it. She was still stroking the cat when the door of Sarah’s house opened and a man came out.

  He was a tall man with a moustache. Sarah was standing in the doorway behind him. Her fair hair fell down her back onto a dressing gown. The man made a discreet farewell with his hand and went quickly through the tunnel of the sotoportego. He did not see Julia Garnet who stayed stock still, crouched over the cat, as if, in that position, her very life hung on a thread.

  III

  VISITATION

  1

  Julia remained frozen, squatting, while the cat, seeing the open door, padded across to investigate. Sarah standing in the doorway was watching after the vanished Carlo. She had turned to go back inside when she must have half caught sight of Julia and swung round again.

  ‘Julia?’

  ‘Sarah.’ She could not say more. Even to say the name seemed as much as her life was worth.

  ‘Julia! What are you doing?’

  Julia, still crouching, stared at her. Impossible not to grasp the significance of Carlo’s hasty, furtive departure. Her vertebrae felt as if they had fused together in a hoop, leaving her bent in a posture of humiliation.

  ‘Julia. Are you all right? Come and have some coffee.’

  It was a long way up to the top of the house. Julia laboured up the stone stairs behind the youthful back, careless in its dressing gown, the fair hair streaming. Had Carlo caressed that pale hair? Don’t think about it. Go on climbing.

  At the top she almost swayed and fell, the climb and her dipping blood sugar making her dizzy.

  ‘Come in, Julia. Coffee? Or you prefer tea, don’t you?’ Sarah fussed around the sink, making a distraction for both of them.

  ‘Tea, please, if you have it.’

  The large bed across the room was a cascade of dishevelled sheets. Sarah, having set a kettle to boil, went over and pulled vaguely at the cover. ‘Sorry about the mess. I shouldn’t have asked you in to see all this but it was rather a surprise you being there.’

  ‘I felt like a walk.’

  ‘Were you coming to see me? I’m not generally up at this hour.’ The pale blue eyes looked dead at her and it was Julia who blushed.

  ‘I wanted to see the house…’ Dust and ashes.

  ‘I see.’ Sarah put tea bags in the teapot. Without turning round she said, ‘And you saw your friend.’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘Carlo. You saw Carlo leaving here. I’m sorry if it embarrassed you.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Julia found a vestige of an old tone. ‘I was startled, of course, but…’

  ‘These things happen. It was the party, I think we both had a bit too much to drink.’ Sarah laughed. The laugh fell into the middle of the high room and died. They sat and looked at each other in silence until Sarah said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone.’

  ‘My dear child,’ said Julia, pleased to have found a voice, ‘who on earth would I tell?’

  More silence. Julia sipped her tea. The milk was off—not yet fully sour but tasting buttery. The slight sickly taint on her tongue was gratifying to her mood.

  Sarah said, ‘You won’t mention it to him either, will you, that you saw him? I feel a bit of a twit. He’s probably old enough to be my grandfather. I know he’s a friend of yours.’

  ‘Hardly.’ Julia spoke stiffly. It was abominable having the girl press the matter like this. ‘We are slightly acquainted.’

  ‘Oh, but he told me how fond he was of you.’

  Julia, her heart lurching painfully, tried to suppress a dart of joy. Not wholly succeeding she couldn’t resist asking, ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said he liked going to concerts with you. Julia, do you think I’m mad?’ />
  ‘Really, I couldn’t say.’ And then because the girl’s eyes were filling with tears she said, ‘Sarah, I’m not familiar with the conduct of love affairs. I’m sorry.’

  Sarah, who had got up and was staring out of the window, said, ‘It’s all such a mess.’

  Upbringing can be a ruthless god. Although she longed to rush from the place screaming, Julia’s mouth formed words. ‘A mess?’

  ‘Yes, me, Tobes, everything.’

  ‘But you have your work.’ Always in her mind lay the cool interior of the little chapel: a tranquil oasis—the home of the blue angel. Struggling to be fair she felt her own tears rise. ‘And you have done the restoration work so beautifully.’

  ‘Oh that!’ Sarah spoke almost contemptuously. ‘It’s my private life that needs restoring.’

  ‘What is it that you think is wrong?’ Extraordinary that she, of all people, should be discussing such a subject with a young woman who had casually spent the night with the man she herself loved.

  ‘I told you. I was a victim of child abuse. You didn’t want to hear. People generally don’t.’

  Julia, summoning up the balcony overlooking the Angelo Raffaele where she and Sarah had sat, thought, I shall not sit there again. Dust and ashes. Dust and ashes. ‘I’m sorry if you felt I spurned your confidences.’

  She had intended a half-irony but Sarah, taking her at face value, said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters really, does it? The main thing is I can trust you not to talk about any of this. Do you know, sometimes I think of throwing myself out of this window. It’s terribly tempting.’

  Oh yes, thought Julia, I know how you feel!

  ‘Shouldn’t you see someone? I don’t know much about these things—well, nothing at all, in fact—but I seem to have heard there are people one can talk to.’

  ‘I went.’ Sarah spoke roughly. ‘Five years of therapy. That’s how I ended up wanting to top myself.’