Miss Garnet's Angel (10 page)

At first she had been horrified, revolted even. ‘Disgusting!' she had spat angrily when finally she had dully shifted her weight off to bed that first night. And she had lain, fully clothed, in the dark holding her sides. But love is notorious for its refusal to observe prejudice and gradually the eyes of Carlo, as she had last seen him, reinstated themselves. They no longer seemed cold. Sad, yes, she was sure that what she had seen was sadness, sadness and dismay. Did he miss her at all? Her heart hurt when she thought of him and she thought of him most minutes of most hours of most days.

Once on her wanderings she had caught sight of the Cut-forths, arm in arm, Cynthia looking in a furrier's window—he comfortably lighting one of his perpetual little cheroots—and she had drawn back into the shadow of an alley. To witness such linked and homely familiarity (for the strongest impression she had carried with her from the Gritti was of the Cutforths' close and, somehow, practical intimacy) was starkly painful. Seeing them so unquestioningly together, it was as if the polite pair had put their hands on their spare hips and jeered at her uncoupled state.

In an effort to avoid all known contacts she roamed far from her usual patch. One day, penetrating to the Arsenale, the fortified area where Venice built its ships, forgetting that this is where she and Carlo had drunk the flat prosecco, she encountered a middle-aged woman sitting beside one of the lions which guard the entrance of the old archway. Caught by something in the woman's expression Julia stopped by the lion. ‘Do you speak English?'

The woman turned and Julia saw that tears were in her eyes. ‘If I speak anything.'

Love—even for what we cannot have—can make us brave. ‘Have you lost somebody?' Julia Garnet asked.

But the woman only gave a half-groan and Julia, observing the body of a cat floating in the canal, was reminded of Stella and walked on.

Once, in another quarter of the city, she fetched up in the bar where the gondoliers meet, to which Carlo had joked about bringing her. Maybe he would be there? The lurch in her heart made her dizzy and she ordered a brandy. It was half-ten in the morning and the bartender spoke admiringly. ‘Brandy for the Signora?' After that she walked with a lift in her step for an hour or so until the black pit opened again and she and all she ever possessed fell once more into it.

Many days passed like this and at night she hardly slept. I suppose I am having what is known as a nervous breakdown, thought Julia Garnet.

During all this time she heard nothing from Carlo or from Nicco. Poor Nicco! For she found she had no wish to see him, was indeed violently angry with the boy who had done no more than attract the desire, unasked, of the man she had so foolishly come to love. More than love, she adored him. With no other witness to her grief she spoke aloud one day to the red-robed Madonna with the grave child whose picture she had reinstated on her bedroom wall. ‘I adore you, I adore you.'

She was conscious of a feeling of shame that these ardent
words had as their object not the so-called mother of God but an ageing Italian paedophile. But the Virgin's almond eyes looked back unreproving and a fugitive notion entered Julia Garnet's thoughts. Maybe, she formed the words to herself, maybe she doesn't mind?—and the idea was curiously reassuring.

Perhaps it was this reassurance which determined Julia to do what she had so far avoided and return to the glimmering domes of St Mark's.

There was a cold wind as she marched back down the Calle Lunga and she pulled down the veil of Harriet's hat. Its fine mesh made a protection against the blast on her face and she found there was a further comfort in it: for behind her veil she could look out at passers-by without herself being scrutinised. Harriet! What would Harriet have made of her friend falling so passionately and, it must be said, so unsuitably in love at this time in her life? It was ironic when you thought how it was she who had always been charging Harriet with unsuitability. Had Harriet ever been in love? she wondered, crossing the bridge where the view of the Salute's bubble domes held out the promise of the basilica's domes to come. She would not now be surprised to learn that there had been a secret lover in Harriet's life. There was the question over the dyed hair and her companion had displayed certain other signs: a tendency to drink too much sherry; a penchant for unusual hats and handbags; a taste for romantic fiction. She had mocked Harriet's Mills & Boon library books. The bitterness of the wind off the Alps made tangible for her
now the bitterness of her own remorse. Under the guise of ‘common sense' she had cut Harriet ‘down to size', a hideous turn of phrase, as she now saw it. Shuddering at her own deficiencies, as much as at the February winds, she came once more to the edge of the Piazza.

And there it was—more powerful than in memory—the big-bellied roofs the colour of opaque crystal, the wings of the angels gleaming as they mounted ever upwards to the cloud-packed sky.

Why, this is love too, thought Julia Garnet.

Inside, she felt suddenly as if the hugeness of the interior had abated, transmuted rather, into a great cave of golden kindness in which she was no longer alien but an accepted presence. The door to the little side chapel was closed and it was with a sense of relief that she turned to the transept beside it. A notice read ‘For Confessions Only' and really not meaning to, she stepped up to the altar intending only to look.

But what a shock! There in a wooden box sat a little, shrunken figure in purple. Only a priest waiting for confession after all, but she fell back, startled, into the main body of the basilica.

The crowd was processing slowly round between roped corridors. Carpets were laid over the marble floors, whose whirled geometric shapes plunged and swooped, revealing centuries of subsidence. The chairs on which she had sat for Vespers were all packed away.

Julia Garnet stopped by the sign to the treasury and sat
down on the base of a column beneath a long, curved mosaic of a bald saint. The unlooked-for encounter with the priest had disturbed her gingerly recovering equilibrium. Thoughts of all her past petty spitefulnesses to Harriet came flooding back. It might be a relief to confess her faults but she certainly did not want to confess them to an ugly puppety man in a coffin-like box. She sat on the column base in the golden gloom amid the hushed shuffle and the sense of her despair and loss and her own ultimate irrelevance.

*    *    *

A movement at the edge of her peripheral vision made her turn. High up and towards a roped-off area—for parts of the cathedral were closed off to the shuffling visitors—a small bird had somehow penetrated the interior and was flitting from carved ledge to ledge.

Julia, watching its speckled brownness, felt a school-marmish urge to reprove the bird for its unauthorised entry into the famous church. But on the heels of the school-marmishness followed another impulse: a kind of respectful admiration for the audacity of the thing.

As she watched, the sparrow landed on a carved figure in the marble. A face, the Madonna's face, and in her arms a child. An intense desire to approach closer to the face beset Julia Garnet and she did a thing she had never before done in her life: she defied an implicit order and ducked under the prohibiting rope.

No one was about. It was towards the end of the day and the cathedral was preparing to close. The long silver lamps
were slowly being switched off. Julia's eyes, grown accustomed to the dimness, made out a low stool at the feet of the carving. Removing her shoes she stepped upon it in stockinged feet and stretching up she kissed the marble Madonna's hand.

*    *    *

That night Julia Garnet slept without pursuant dreams. When she woke sun had made its way through the edges of the shutters and was painting oblique bars upon the walls. Going out onto the balcony she felt it warm her shoulders. Although only February the air carried traces of Spring.

She set a pan of water to boil while she went down to look for post. And yes, there was a package on the radiator-shelf. Signora Mignelli must have been in already. Julia took it upstairs before making her tea in the enamel pot.

There was no milk but the scalding tea was reviving and there was a piece of stale almond cake too, which she took pleasure in dunking in the golden liquid. Her father would have disapproved.

‘Bloody old bastard!' Julia Garnet spoke aloud. She tidied up her breakfast things, sprinkling the crumbs over the balcony for the birds, before opening the package.

Vera Kessel had not been too surprised when her friend had written asking if she would be good enough to purchase and send on to her a King James Bible. The tone of the letter had been sufficiently like what Vera had known of her old friend not to be too alarmed at the content.
It must be the 1611 translation,
the letter had specified.
No other version will do. And
I absolutely do not want
(this last had been underlined)
one of those editions which sickly everything over with a pale cast of modernity. Definitely no New English rubbish, please!

Vera, who followed the vaguest indication of another's needs as if carrying out a legal instruction, had spent her day off searching out an Authorised Bible. Dyed-in-the-wool Socialist that she was, an acute observer might have detected that there was a kind of
frisson
attached to this enterprise. It was not a thought which Vera herself would have recognised but it was rather as if her old friend had suddenly requested she search out for her seamy or pornographic literature.

I
am sending you The Apocrypha as well,
she had written.
I
thought I might as well send you the whole damn boiling—since you seem to be immersed in Holy writs.
This last was Vera's idea of a joke, and out of gratitude for her friend's efforts Julia afforded it an indulgent smile. It had been generous of Vera to give up her day, although, Julia noted, she had been unable to resist mentioning the fact in her letter.

It is such a trial, these days, getting about in Central London but luckily I had a day off and was able to combine your book search with a visit to the National Gallery.

A picture postcard accompanied the letter. A Titian portrait: the man with a blue sleeve. He stared out, across the slashed, billowing blue silk, with unblinking confidence at Julia. How funny! Vera, ardent Socialist that she was, had clearly responded to the aristocratic hauteur of the man. People, she was beginning to see, were made up of different bits. The portrait reminded Julia of the ‘foxy-whiskered
gentleman', Jemima Puddle-duck's attentive suitor who, she recognised suddenly, she had, as a child, found sexually attractive. Maybe it was some dim awareness of this that had made her hide the book from Carlo the day he called and just missed Nicco—when he had seemed so angry with her. Of course she knew now why.

Her stomach plunged and she pushed her mind back to Vera. On the back of the card Vera had written,
To remind you of the real world.
‘Real' was underlined with three stripes of Biro.

Oh dear, thought Julia pouring herself another cup of straw-coloured tea. What is, after all, the
real
world? I wish I knew.

The padded envelope yielded a dense black-bound book with gold-blocked letters: The Holy Bible. The fly leaf announced that it was
Translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty's special command.
Good old Vera. She was ‘diligent' too. She really shouldn't mock a friend who carried out one's wishes with such exemplary exactitude.

Turning the rice-paper thin page to
The names and order of all the books of the Old and New Testament
Julia scanned the fine-printed list. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers…these, of course she knew. But there were others, half registered, less familiar, Joshua, Esther, Ezra, and some she had never heard of, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah. But of Tobit there was no sign.

There! She knew she had been right. The Book of Tobit
was some Catholic extravagance. It didn't even feature in the Protestant Bible!

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.