Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  It was, she reflected later, travelling back on the Central Line to Holland Park, no less remarkable, in its way, that she should sit on a balcony in Ealing sipping sparkling wine with a Lebanese businessman (the nature of Mr Akbar’s business remained obscure to her but it seemed to involve party novelties) to the accompaniment of Elvis Presley’s ‘Suspicious Minds’, than that she should be looking out across the lighted waters of Venice.

  Mr Akbar had insisted on telephoning his solicitor—who, he explained, was also his cousin’s husband—there and then. It was all she could do to explain to him the fruitlessness, at that hour in the evening, of her ringing her own firm in High Holborn, with whom she had the slenderest connections. But she promised to be in touch with the solicitors first thing in the morning.

  ‘We are friends,’ Mr Akbar declared at the door as she declined more mint tea. So she had made another friend.

  * * *

  Harriet’s solicitors had made their communications with Julia’s, so she was able to combine the two operations when she called at Derbyshire & Mills the following day. In the past Julia’s concerns had been dealt with by an overworked assistant solicitor called Sita. But on this occasion Mr Mills, the junior senior partner, met her in the vestibule and led her into a roomy office.

  ‘Do sit down. Some tea, coffee—or something stronger as a celebration?’ Mr Mills smiled, showing dentures.

  ‘Coffee, please,’ said Julia, perversely since it disagreed with her.

  Mr Mills read out forms, laboured points and repeated himself several times until Julia’s nostalgia for Sita mounted. At the end of it all, as inwardly she was fairly screaming to leave, he said, clearing his throat, ‘Ahhhm, your own will. Forgive the liberty but should we not, in the light of all…?’

  Julia had not thought about her own death which, with hindsight, surprised her. ‘Goodness, Mr Mills, I suppose you are right. How thoughtful you are.’

  Mr Mills, unused to this client, was uncertain how to take her tone. ‘It is generally advisable,’ he continued. ‘And your being overseas and so on…’ he laughed with nervous unhumour.

  ‘My health has never been better than since I went abroad but of course I shall consider what you say most carefully. May I write to you about it? I suppose any necessary documentation may be posted along with the contract?’

  It was agreed she formulate her bequests and write from Venice, and at last she was permitted to go.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Mills. Do give my love to Sita. I’m so sorry to miss her but you filled in beautifully.’

  So, she thought, boarding the Tube, wealth has brought me Mr Mills. What else will it bring, I wonder?

  The Tube was hot and claustrophobic; she got out early at Notting Hill Gate and made her way on foot to the hotel. The heat and the unaccustomed coffee had fagged her and she felt a stitch coming on again in her side.

  Recuperating on the bed, in a modishly pastel-coloured room with matching en-suite bath and shower, and hearing the sound of traffic outside, she experienced an acute homesickness for the noiseless, peeling dilapidations of the Campo Angelo Raffaele. She had visited Signora Mignelli before she had left for England and put to her the proposition which she had conjured up on the Cutforths’ balcony. ‘I would so much like it if I could rent your apartment for the year.’ And she named a sum for rental which she hoped the Signora would be unable to refuse.

  The Signora had been enthusiastic in her acceptance. She regretted that she had Germans coming for the whole of August. ‘But September is free,’ she said emphatically. ‘My tenant from America cancel—so it is good for both of us. Good for me because I keep deposit—and good for you because you move in more quick!’

  The following morning, teeth rather gritted—for, undeniably, there was something about London which disinclined one to make effort (‘But really I must!’ she insisted to herself)—she rang Vera from the hotel room.

  ‘Julia! You should have said you were coming to England!’ Vera, as ever, was reproachful.

  ‘I didn’t know myself,’ said Julia, not wholly untruthfully.

  Vera lived in a mansion block near Marylebone High Street. It had, in fact, Julia surmised (her sense of such things heightened by her recent forays among the Ealing estate agents), risen in value to become a ‘desirable’ property. But Vera, she noticed, was enamoured of its drawbacks.

  ‘Of course this will be very difficult to sell,’ she said when Julia raised the topic of the proposed move. ‘The noise from the traffic.’

  ‘But handy for theatres,’ said Julia, refusing to join in Vera’s sense of deprivation.

  Vera looked displeased. ‘I’m sorry there’s nowhere decent to sit down,’ she said, moving papers from a perfectly comfortable armchair. ‘Was the lift all right?’

  ‘I think so—it got me here!’

  ‘We’ve had such a time with the porter. He’s not quite, you know!’ Vera, lowering her voice needlessly (for after all who but herself was there to hear, Julia noted with irritation), tapped her head significantly. ‘Bats in the belfry,’ she mouthed. ‘I dread to think what he might say to the purchasers!’

  Julia, thinking fondly of Toby’s bats in the Chapel-of-the-Plague, hoped the porter might make lewd suggestions to Vera’s potential purchasers. ‘I wonder if I could trouble you for some of my books?’ Before her departure to Venice she had packed her books into a couple of boxes which Vera had offered to keep for her.

  ‘They’re in the spare room, I’m afraid.’ Vera sighed as if foreseeing some overwhelming challenge.

  ‘I’m so sorry to be a trouble,’ said Julia, not sorry at all.

  The boxes were under Vera’s spare bed and after making much of pulling them out she left Julia to go through them and went off to make lunch. ‘Take whatever you like.’

  ‘Yes, I will, thank you,’ said Julia, amused at being invited to take so freely of her own.

  During lunch she tried to make amends for her behaviour by reading to Vera, from one of her rescued textbooks, about Garum, an ancient remedy, much prized by the Romans and made from the decomposed innards of an exotic fish.

  ‘What do you want to know about that for? I should think it was more likely to give them food poisoning,’ said Vera huffily. ‘Still, I’m glad to see you’re back on history again. Thank heaven you’ve given up all that Bible-reading caper. I thought you were going potty.’

  ‘Like your porter?’ Julia asked and was glad when she saw the time made it possible to leave without further rudenesses on her own part.

  After Vera’s determined pessimism it was fun taking a taxi to St Martin’s Lane. There was a bookshop she wanted to visit—one she had seen in passing on her occasional trips to the Coliseum with Harriet. Dear Harriet! They had sat in the amphitheatre—‘the Armpit’, Harriet had called it, on account of the sweat-inducing heat, and eaten home-made cheese and pickle sandwiches and drunk tea from a flask in the interval. And all the while Harriet had been a wealthy woman. She would be glad about the taxi.

  Later that night, the traffic making the pale pink hotel furnishings judder (like blancmange, Julia thought), she ordered tea and sandwiches from Room Service—in memory of Harriet.

  She hadn’t looked at her old Atlas of the Ancient World (removed from under Vera’s bed) since her student days, and opening it and finding Nimrod she felt a pulse of pleasure. This was how she had felt when, as a schoolgirl, she had planned her escape from her father’s house by reading history at university. Below Nimrod, a short way south down the River Tigris, she found Nineveh, Tobit’s city, or rather the one he was forced to inhabit after his conquerors had annihilated Israel. So this was Assyria? But it got its comeuppance in the end, for Nineveh was taken by the Medes and their allies the subtle Persians, and like the ten tribes of vanquished Israel it too vanished to become history. Old Tobit would have been pleased!

  Turning the page to find the Persian Empire she found a bus ticket: 3d—the price of a ride along the Cambridge ‘backs’. Thruppence
. She had forgotten the little twelve-sided coins with the clump of thrift, or the portcullis of the Bank of England, on the back. A coin you used to give to children who were good, or for washing your windows or fetching coal. You lived as though a way of life would last for ever, and when it went, it vanished, even from your own memory.

  But her Tobias—where had he travelled? With her finger she followed down the Tigris. Ecbatana, the capital of Media, Sara’s home, was well east of Assyria, over the Zagros Mountains, and nowadays it seemed to be the town of Hamadan. And Raghes, by the Caspian Sea, where Tobias was to collect the family debt, looked as if it might have become the modern city of Tehran.

  Opening the door of the fridge-bar she took out a miniature brandy and unscrewed the cap, imagining what her father would make of his daughter ‘taking’, as he would have put it, ‘to the devil drink’? ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom!’ he had said, striking her across the shoulders, as she sat, refusing him the satisfaction of seeing her weep. The Proverbs of old Tobit’s God, Yahweh. ‘The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways,’ portentously her father had also uttered, not at all understanding, she guessed (and feeling, at this, the need to pour more brandy), what those words might mean.

  * * *

  The twins were to be married in Devon and on the train (first-class, courtesy of Harriet) Julia read the book she had found at the bookshop near St Martin’s Lane. Gaspar, Mel-chior and Balthasar, she learned, were all a Christian fancy. The Magi, it turned out, were not kings at all but from the priestly tribe of the Medes, who did not consider a journey to a humble oxen’s stall beneath their sacerdotal dignity. Their gold and frankincense and myrrh would have been ritual gifts, appropriate to the saviour born of a virgin whose birth was predicted by their prophet, Zoroaster. And Zoroaster’s holy city proved to be none other than Raghes!

  Excitement gripped her heart, making it flutter and jump. There, she knew it! That was why Tobit wanted his son to go there to collect a debt. What was a debt anyway? Something of yourself you needed to have restored. And it was Raphael, after all, who collected the debt from Raghes in the end. Unconsciously, the old boy must have known a change of heart was the Tobit family’s best hope! No wonder the funny, charming story, that had so impressed the artists of Venice, was excluded from the Protestant Bible: it was not really a Jewish morality tale at all but something far older—kinder, in fact. In her notebook, bracing it against the train’s centripetal force, she wrote: The Zoroastrian priests of Media (later Persia) would bring a dog to the bedside of a dying man—for him to feed the dog a morsel and so be led by it safely after death across the Bridge of Separation to be judged.

  Here she stopped and thought about judgement. The laughing Zoroaster apparently believed our world was a battleground between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Perhaps he was right. It no longer made sense to her to think in the old rigid pre-Venice days about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but maybe life was a matter of having to makes choices. (Though how did you know which was which? And how had she fared in that test?)

  And the Nasu—that seemed to be the Persian name for the corpse-spirit, the executive of evil. The dog—which didn’t make Jewish sense—she understood, now, why it was there. The train was fairly hurtling along so she took her notebook onto her lap, cradling it.

  If the Median part of the Tobit story is, as I think, really Zoroastrian, that explains why the dog is there—to rid the girl of the destructive spirit which has got into her.

  She thought a bit more, then wrote: The dog is there to smell out death and the death-dealing spirit. So the dog has two functions: (i) he represents natural instinct—Tobit lacks this which makes him morbid but his son has it in abundance, which is why (with the right help) he can sexually penetrate the girl where others have failed; (ii) the dog leads to life after death—whether physical death or death of a moribund way of being (i.e. the girl’s and Tobit’s).

  But, of course, we all have a spirit of destruction in us, reflected Julia Garnet, as the train swayed into, then braked at, Totnes station.

  * * *

  If the notion of a synagogue had ever been raised it had been discarded, for the wedding was to take place in a church close to Sarah’s family home. Whatever was Jewish in Sarah had been overlaid by the Anglicanism of her father’s family.

  And perhaps that is as it should be—out of respect, Julia decided, smoothing the skirts of her lilac dress as she extricated herself from the taxi and rearranging Harriet’s cream silk shawl around her shoulders as she took in the Englishness of the churchyard before her.

  The wedding passed off as weddings do: the church was picturesque with its square Norman tower and wagon-vault roof; the vicar’s sermon was affable, the hymns cheerful and Sarah looked fetching in lace. But there was none of the mystery and passion, nothing of the anguish and drama (which is, Julia speculated, surely also the prerogative of marriage) she had found in the Venetian services. Half way through the ceremony she became conscious that she was disappointed. Everything was in good taste, but the sum of it was insipid.

  It is all too pink, she decided later: the salmon, the raspberries—even the vicar, who had divested himself of his dog-collar and was demonstrating his pliancy by jiving with one of the ladies in charge of the tea. Lucky her departure on the following day had given her an excuse to leave early.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said, going across to Toby. ‘It has been marvellous, but I’m getting old and I have a train to catch.’

  ‘You’re not old, Julia—you look dishy in that dress. I’d marry you myself if I weren’t hitched up with a beautiful woman already.’

  ‘Flatterer!’ For the first time in her life Julia flirted back.

  ‘No, really, I’m serious. I won’t forget our midnight walk.’

  ‘Hardly midnight!’

  ‘Well, dawn walk, whatever. Don’t be such a schoolmarm! Look, I’ve never said—’

  ‘Well don’t!’ Julia was crisp. ‘Least said soonest mended, if you want me to be a schoolmarm. Anyway, I have a present for you both. I couldn’t find anything I thought you would like so I’ve got you something I like instead.’ She handed him a flat package.

  ‘If you’re really off I’m going to open it. I should wait for Sarah but looks like she’s tied up with Uncle Herb.’

  Julia looked across the field to where the marquee was pitched. Sarah stood at the entrance, her arm round a short, powerful-looking man with a top hat and long grey hair. ‘Goodness, he looks terrifying! He’s your mother’s brother?’

  She had been introduced to Sarah’s mother, a grey-haired, sparrow-boned woman who looked as if she was struggling between grief and joy. And her husband, Sarah’s father, Toby’s Uncle Bill, was he around somewhere to see his only daughter safe at last? Or had that astonishing remediate gaze in the chapel dissolved all remnant of darkness before it?

  But (giving herself the faintest peremptory shake) this she was never likely to know; such a matter was for the privacy of the marriage bed. ‘Half-brother,’ Toby cut in. ‘Grandma married twice. He’s OK. Rich as Croesus. It’s thanks to his wonga we’re able to do the chapel.’

  ‘I remember you said. What made the money?’

  ‘Cocktail biscuits,’ said Toby and, explosively, they both started to laugh.

  ‘Biscuits and pizzas!’ Julia, holding on to the arm Toby didn’t have round her, had to resort to Harriet’s handkerchief. ‘The modern mainstays of restoration.’ Then, more soberly—the slight tension dissipated—‘She’s all right, then, your Sarah?’

  Toby, tanned, looked well. His shoulders had straightened out, become broader, somehow. Shading his eyes to look across to his wife he said, ‘We have our days but she’s riding again, which I reckon’s good for her.’

  In her mind’s eye Julia saw the long, intelligent noses of the bronze horses of St Mark’s. ‘Much better, I should think, than any “therapy”!’

  ‘Hey!’ Toby had unwrapped the parcel
to reveal a red-bound book. ‘The Apocrypha. This looks cool!’

  ‘I thought you might like to read the Book of Tobit. We nearly spoke of it once and, well, you’ll maybe see why I like it.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Toby. ‘Then I guess we’ll like it too!’

  * * *

  The sun had retreated by the time Julia reached Plymouth station and she was grateful for Harriet’s shawl. The buffet was closed so she couldn’t even have a cup of tea and she had to make do with the comforts of her book until the train arrived. When it did she banged her shin on the step up to the carriage and, rubbing it, recalled the day she had arrived in Venice and met Cynthia and Charles. It was England where she felt a stranger now.

  Her eyes were tired and she had some difficulty finding her seat number so that when she at last plumped down with her back to the engine (a placing which did not best please her) she did not immediately observe the dark-haired girl opposite.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Julia, who had withdrawn into her book, looked up to see that it was her fellow passenger who was asking the question. ‘How kind of you—I’m fairly parched.’

  ‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind guarding my things I’ll get us both one, unless there’s anything else you would like?’

  Julia thanked her but declined anything but tea. Within minutes the girl was back, carefully carrying the two beakers in their plastic handles. ‘Disgusting looking, I’m afraid—bright orange but at least it wets the whistle.’

  ‘My father used to say that!’ The girl’s friendliness was unexpectedly soothing.

  ‘Did he? That’s funny, mine does still. Cheers!’ The girl smiled and raised a beaker towards Julia who drank gratefully. The day had been more of a drain that she had expected.

  After a bit the girl said, ‘Forgive me if I’m prying but I was looking at your book.’ She gestured at the book which Julia had placed, cover down, on the table between them.