Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  Seven men gone to their death. Were there seven devils to match the seven angels? What were their names? Uriel, Michael, Raguel, Gabriel, Saraqûel, Remiel. And Raphael, of course.

  * * *

  She woke with her heart jumping. Someone was outside the room. Commanding herself not to move, she lay rigid. There it was again. An awful, muffled fumbling sound and then the door was being opened. Horror of horrors! An interloper! She must not cry out. Stay calm. Don’t say a word. Play asleep. Play dead. No, not dead, not yet, she wasn’t ready for that!

  A man’s voice swore softly, ‘Shit!’ Then the light came flooding on and she had sprung off the bed and was crouched beside it ready to do she knew not what to her assailant.

  ‘Who the fuck…?’

  ‘Toby!’

  She had come close to hitting him. They glared at each other. Then, ‘Oh, Toby, I’m so glad it’s you. I’m sorry. I must…sorry, the bathroom.’ She had nearly wet herself. From the mirror her face stared at her under the greenish bulb. Going out she said again, ‘I’m so sorry. It was a shock.’

  ‘Why are you sorry? It should be me.’

  He sounded belligerent but she didn’t care. ‘It must have been a shock for you too. Shall I make us some tea?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. D’you mind if I smoke?’

  ‘No, go on. Please.’ How English they were being.

  Toby took out a packet of Golden Virginia tobacco and some papers and rolled a spindly cigarette. She watched him, fascinated by his dexterity.

  ‘Do you mind me smoking because, look, I can go onto the balcony?’

  ‘Not a bit. I quite like the smell.’ It reminded her of Carlo. Carlo who had perhaps slept here with Toby’s sister. ‘Toby, does Sarah know you’re back?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh!’ She felt forlorn that she was not to be the one to break the news: the return of the Prodigal Son. ‘Where is she, Toby?’ That she had not meant to say.

  ‘Search me! I expected her to be here. What are you doing?’

  So the twins hadn’t spoken. ‘Sarah asked me to stay. She’s been beside herself with worry.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘No, Toby, it’s true. She had no idea where you were.’

  ‘Sarah?’ Now he was staring at her. A gap opened in her mind and she could see there was something she had misconstrued. ‘Sar knows exactly where I’ve been!’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Panic began to threaten—her heart was fluttering like a bird—for a moment she struggled to breathe. Was she losing her mind—like her father? ‘Toby—have you got the painting?’

  ‘What painting?’

  ‘The angel panel.’ She knew he hadn’t. Only true sincerity manifests itself in a certain kind of stupidity.

  ‘The angel panel?’

  She wanted to shout, ‘The angel painting! The one you showed me. The one you found the day I walked under your scaffolding and into your chapel and into the life of you and your bloody sister. The one wrapped like a portion of blue sky in a grey blanket which the two of you—damn your eyes!—played fast and loose with. The angel, my angel, the Archangel Raphael.’ But instead she said, quite gently, ‘Yes, Toby. The angel with the blue wings.’

  ‘Isn’t it in the chapel?’ He sat down awkwardly on the bed.

  ‘Toby,’ she said, for suddenly an idea was slipping in and out of the rapid gap in her mind and she needed to speak it before it became impossible to say. ‘Where do you sleep? When you are not in the chapel—when you are here, where do you sleep?’

  He turned puzzled eyes and she saw how like his sister’s they were: the palest aquamarine, ringed with black. ‘Here of course,’ patting the unmade bed. ‘I won’t tonight but normally…’

  ‘With Sarah?’

  ‘Yeah with Sarah. Hey, this is the late twentieth century, you know. We’re over age—consenting adults. I mean, it’s not illegal.’

  ‘But she’s your sister!’ Toby got up from the bed and felt in his pocket for his tobacco. ‘Toby, you have a cigarette already.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ He sat down again. Neither spoke. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten your name.’

  ‘Julia.’

  ‘Yeah, of course. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right, said Julia. ‘Why should you remember?’

  ‘She’s not my sister.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s not my sister.’

  ‘But you’re twins.’ Toby got up, stubbed out his cigarette in the sink and sat down to roll another one. ‘You even look alike.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. We are twins. We’re cousins—not brother and sister.’

  ‘But Sarah said you were twins?’ Now it was she who sounded stupid.

  ‘That’s right. We are. Same birthdays. Both on the first of May. My mum and her mum’s sisters. My mother came to visit my aunt in hospital and went into labour—two months early. I was born the same day, just before midnight. Sarah always says it was seeing her ugly face that did it! My aunt says it was my mum being competitive. Sibling rivalry.’ She’d forgotten how when he smiled he became attractive.

  ‘Cousins?’

  ‘Yeah. And, you know, it’s all right for cousins to do it.’ Embarrassed, he looked at the floor.

  ‘So you do sleep together? I’m so sorry, Toby, this is absolutely not my business.’

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t mind. Sarah been telling you tales then?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Bet she has. Did she say she was abused as a child too? That’s one of her favourite lines. Her dad worshipped the ground she trod on, but there was never any funny stuff.’

  It was fantastic, what he was saying, and yet, dumbly, inexorably, she knew it was the truth. She was not a perceptive person, and yet even she had felt—what could you call it?—the ghost of an intimation of something not quite right in Sarah’s story, something, well, out of true, was how best to describe it. Yes, Sarah’s story of childhood abuse had not touched or angered her—she had put it down to her own limitations of feeling, but now she knew the response was an accurate one—because of how differently this was making her feel.

  Toby’s voice was still speaking. ‘She couldn’t do anything wrong so far as he was concerned. Auntie Daisy was a bit tougher—but there wasn’t anything sinister in Sarah’s childhood apart from the fact that they wouldn’t let her learn tap.’

  ‘Tap?’

  ‘Yeah, tap dancing. She created a scene about it when she was six. I still remember her yelling and screaming like they were murdering her or something. I was impressed.’ He laughed angrily. ‘I never got my way, not like her, anyway—but then my mum and dad were poor. We spent all our holidays together, right up to art school. They always called us “the twins”, the family did.’

  ‘But Toby, why has she said these things? Why would she want to make up something so appalling?’

  Toby shrugged. ‘God knows. Look, she’d been having these headaches. “Migraines”, yeah? Then she started to not eat—lost about a stone. Some jerk told her it was psychological—pressure from home—which was bollocks. There was never any pressure put on Sarah. She wouldn’t even wear braces to put pressure on her teeth when she was a kid! So, one day she goes to this therapist’—he made a movement with his mouth as if to spit—‘near where her folks live down in Devon—they have this big house, lovely garden, horses, all that.’

  ‘Did you mind?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All that. If you were poor. The big house, the horses?’

  Toby pulled at his cigarette. ‘Nah! Home was OK. And I could go to Sarah’s any time. Uncle Bill and Auntie Daisy used to be my second mum and dad.’

  ‘So, the therapist?’

  ‘Well, you know the joke, don’t you? Take Therapist apart and it spells The Rapist. And that’s what this one was.’

  ‘No good?’

  ‘Evil! She got Sarah in her clutches and the next thing we knew Sarah was saying she couldn’t
stay home any more. She came to stay with my mum and dad for a bit. Uncle Bill and Auntie Daisy started out by saying that it was only fair because up till then I’d always gone down to Devon. They were like, “She’s just balancing things up.” You could tell they were hurt though. I didn’t like it because I missed the horses. And Sarah had gone weird. Funny diets, couldn’t touch the things we ate, raw carrot, no alcohol—which was a laugh ’cos she’d always put it away—had to have her bed facing north—that kind of crap. Anyway, after a while she wrote to Uncle Bill saying she wanted a meeting with him at her therapist’s place.’ Toby grimaced. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘D’you want to hear all this? It’s pretty shit!’

  Julia thought—I have been so wrapped up in myself all my life. Aloud she said, ‘If you want to tell me, I’d like to hear.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it cuts me up. Sorry. Anyway, Bill and Auntie Daisy rang me up about it and I could tell they were a bit worried so I said not to touch it with a bargepole. Fat chance!’

  ‘He went anyway?’

  Toby took a meaningful drag. ‘Yup! Old Uncle Billy toddled off, innocent as a new-born babe, to be told by this cow that he’d fucked his only beloved daughter—sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

  Julia passed him her handkerchief. ‘It happens to be the correct word for what you describe,’ she said. ‘Why be sorry? What happened?’

  ‘It killed him,’ said Toby, screwing the embroidered square of lace into a ball. HMJ: Harriet’s initials. ‘He couldn’t take it. He adored her. Everyone started this “no smoke without fire” stuff—which is bollocks, by the way, you get smoke from dry ice—even Auntie Daisy started to ask questions. I couldn’t stand it—it really did my head in. Is there any more tea?’

  Julia got up and went over to the pot. She kept her back deliberately turned while she refilled the mug. ‘They’re insidious, those expressions. “No smoke without fire”—it gives a false sense of wisdom.’ It had been said, she remembered, of Mr Kenton. ‘Please go on, if you want to, that is.’

  ‘It was breaking them up. Auntie Daisy was in the middle between Bill and Sarah. Sarah refused to see Uncle Bill, wouldn’t come to the house if he was there and so on. He was about to move out. If I ever meet that fucking therapist I’ll fucking kill her too.’

  ‘How did he die?’ She didn’t really want to know but the story was too awful to leave suspended.

  ‘Hanged himself,’ said Toby briefly. ‘In one of the barns.’

  ‘Oh, Toby,’ Julia said.

  Her lips had gone numb. In his senile years her father had once torn open her blouse and scrabbled at her breast, trying to suck at it. She had pushed him away, repelled, and buttoned the blouse angrily and left. But later that night, in the bath, she had remembered that once, after her mother died he had pulled her to him and fervently kissed her, his lips wet. Most definitely she had not liked the experience. But suppose he had hanged himself on account of it?

  ‘But this woman. What happened to her? Didn’t the family do something?’

  ‘What could they do? Bill was dead. Daisy nearly went round the bend with guilt. And Sarah—how d’you bring yourself to face that? She never has, far as I know.’

  ‘But she doesn’t see this dreadful woman any more, does she? She told me it had made her suicidal.’ No wonder the girl had spoken of wanting to throw herself from the balcony.

  ‘Nah. She stopped seeing her. But there was no enquiry. Nothing. The mad cow is probably still destroying decent families’ lives.’

  And according to Toby, Sarah’s father had most faithfully and properly loved his daughter.

  ‘So, that’s why I stick around. She needs someone to look after her. We don’t make love, by the way, since you mention it.’

  ‘Oh, but only because I thought…’

  ‘She can’t, well, won’t anyway. Hardly surprising. I get to cuddle her a bit but we never, you know…Sometimes it all gets too much and I need to take off. Sort my own head out.’

  ‘She seems so…’ What did Sarah seem? She was learning she was no judge of human behaviour. ‘…I always found her so full of confidence.’

  ‘Yeah? She can charm the birds off the trees but underneath…’ Toby scrubbed at an invisible stain on his jeans with Harriet’s hanky, ‘she’s…’

  ‘In hell, I should think. Is that what happened this time? You went away for a break?’ What an accomplished liar Sarah must be. The story of Toby’s unresponsive lover had been delivered so plausibly.

  ‘Sort of. We had a row. You were there!’ The day he had gone to the glass-cutters. Toby hesitated as if to say more and then apparently changed his mind. ‘Anyway, I had these drawings I needed to show a guy in London—a job I might move on to. It seemed a good moment to blow—cool things for a while. But Sarah knew where I was. She always does.’

  ‘She told me you had a girl.’ On Valentine’s Day, out on the balcony, the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, which had once been celebrated as Candlemas.

  ‘There was never any girl for me but Sarah.’

  So it was all a tissue of lies. Well, that was, in its way, a comfort. ‘And you love her?’

  ‘Yeah, I love her. She’s a mess but I couldn’t ever love anyone else.’

  ‘For she is appointed unto thee from the beginning?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Toby. ‘You’ve got it. Something like that!’

  I slept no more that night. The mating frogs were ak-akking to each other in the bulrushes in the ditch below and I watched the sun rise over the distant mountains where Azarias and I had camped together in the days before I knew Sara. Even now after all this time I miss them still, those high, lonely days, with just the two of us and the camels and all my life before me. A chain of black cranes flew along the green bands of the sky, their legs trailing. The world seemed suddenly a marvellous place; I did not want to leave it.

  Sara’s maid called me and laid upon the bed garments made of silk, wedding-robes embroidered in blue and purple. How many before me, I wondered, had worn them? The maidservant, poor soul, was distraught, weeping and urging me to be brave. (Not the best words to hear on your wedding day!)

  Downstairs a ceremonial meal had been prepared and laid out upon tables; barley cakes and honey, white cheeses, sweet almonds, figs and pomegranates, and the dark wine of Media. Sara’s father, Raguel, came towards me. Taking my hand he said, ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for it is meet that you should marry my daughter.’ He turned aside, then turned back to me and clutching at my arm again said, ‘I will declare the truth to you. I have given my daughter in marriage to seven men who died the night they entered her.’ He was a brave man and he looked me in the eye as he said it.

  And perhaps it was this that made me answer as I did. ‘Nonetheless I will eat nor drink nothing until the agreement is sealed between us as to the marriage of myself with your daughter.’

  Then Raguel called Edna, his wife, and he ordered parchment to be brought on which he wrote an instrument of covenant and sealed it. And when the covenant was signed and sealed I spoke again.

  ‘Have no fear,’ I said, though for my part fear was turning my bowels to water. ‘For this day my cousin and I shall be married.’

  Then Raguel called his wife and said, ‘Sister, prepare the chamber and bring our daughter to it.’

  Edna rose, wiping away her tears, and said to me, ‘Be of good comfort. May the Lord give you joy for your sorrow.’ Then she sent servants to spread the bed in the wedding-chamber.

  I looked about but Azarias had departed so alone I climbed the stairs to the chamber in the high tower.

  5

  They talked until the sky through the balcony window began to show not fire but pale gold. Oro pallido. It crossed Julia’s mind to offer that Toby lie down on the bed. But their conversation had been somehow too intimate to suggest it.

  ‘More tea?’ she asked and then, ‘Oh, no go, I’m afraid. We’re out of milk—unless you like it black?’

  ‘We can go out and get so
me? There’s an all-night machine near the station.’

  ‘Of course, if you’d like to.’

  He seemed to want her company for he did not suggest going alone.

  Julia, who had spent her student days in law-abidingness, speculated that this sort of dawn raid was what she had missed in her tame Cambridge life. They walked through silent streets to the station to find the machine empty. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dragged you out. I get restless. Drives Sarah mad!’

  ‘Toby, where might Sarah be tonight?’ She had not mentioned Carlo. Her sighting of the man she loved outside Sarah’s door had ceased to seem important. She was ashamed, amid such tragic matters, to have made such a fuss. Why mention it anyway—it could only muddle things? Given Toby’s story it was unlikely Sarah had slept with Carlo—unless her experience with her father had given her some sort of father-fixation. Somehow Julia doubted it. She remembered now that Sarah had asked her, pleaded with her almost, not to mention what she had seen that morning.

  But where was the girl if not with Carlo? ‘Could Sarah be with your architect friend?’ She did not reveal that this was where Sarah’s note had suggested she would be.

  But Toby didn’t think so. Aldo, he explained, had a difficult mother who was unlikely to welcome a young and attractive female guest.

  So she was right about Aldo; Sarah’s hint of his fascination with her was another of her lies. Perhaps when there was something you could not face, you wove a fiction around yourself to keep the unbearable from you? And then, when you needed it, where would you find a place where you could ever be truthful again?

  ‘I tell you what,’ said Julia after a while. ‘Let’s walk to the chapel. What do you think?’

  ‘Sure, yeah.’

  They walked along the Grand Canal. In the greenish light a green boat chugged by, with a man at the wheel in green overalls and a green cap. It was the second time in three days she had walked across the city. The first, the morning after the party, when she had found Carlo leaving Sarah’s house. Now she was completing the circle.