Miss Garnet's Angel (23 page)

‘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.'

‘Oh dear! Does anything help?'

‘Yes,' said Sarah baldly. ‘Sex helps. That's why I do it. Still, it's better than doing drugs, I suppose.'

She jumped up and walked over to the window again. Looking at her long, youthful back Julia thought, I can't blame him. She's lovely!

With her back still turned Sarah spoke; she sounded angry. ‘Look, I'm sorry, Julia, this isn't your thing at all. Let's talk about how we get your things over here, shall we?'

A
nd here memory becomes blurred: I do not rightly remember how I spent most of the days in Ecbatana. What I do remember is the sense of difference.

For one thing there was more merriment than I was used to at home. They say their prophet Zarathustra was born into the world laughing, and the need for good cheer among men is part of what he taught. And they despise death which to them is the victory of the Lord of Lies and Darkness—the Adversary they call him. This I remember.

I remember, too, that I began to wonder about my father putting the bodies to rest in the ground. Here they build high towers—the Towers of Silence they call them—where they lay out the bodies of the dead and the wild dogs and vultures come and strip the corpses clean so that their own
hands do not touch death. They laughed at me (they are great laughers) when I spoke of the one God, for they have their ‘Wise Lord' the Lord of Light, who is tolerant in the ways and the gods of foreigners. It came to my mind, here in Media, he was a more easy-going god than ours whose name I had so often heard is ‘Jealous', and I wondered about my father in the days of his youth when he travelled here as the king's Purveyor. Had he too felt his spirits lighten when he came to the city of Zarathustra, the holy city of Raghes?

Sara did not like me and she made it plain. I never knew if it was my face, or my origins (for although we were of the same tribe she had lived all her life in Media). Maybe, I came miserably to think, she is born a hater of men; certainly her tongue was waspish.

I'd hardly been in the company of a young woman before and certainly not one so beautiful as Sara. So it came as a shock to hear her speak. I had supposed from her appearance her voice would be gentle and low but instead it had an edge which set your teeth. She laughed at everything I said but not with joy. I felt she was laughing at me rather than at what I had to say to her. ‘So you want to marry me?' she said, and there was something in her way of speaking which diminished me. ‘You'd better be careful, I'm not safe, you know!'

Of course there were the stories of the men who had tried to marry her before. Apart from Sara's hints there were sinister mutterings elsewhere: in the town they spoke of a death, seven deaths even, some said; but although they
had blended with the local community Sara's family were still foreigners and you know how people love to spread rumour especially about those who do not wholly fit in? I hazarded that Sara had broken the spirits of the men who had courted her, so that they became faint-hearted and weak-kneed, and you might as well kill a man as take his resolution from him. I did not intend to ‘die' that way!

Meanwhile Azarias, from whom I expected help, had turned unforthcoming. He spent so much time with Sara's maid that I began to suspect some amorous entanglement and one day challenged him with it. ‘Hey!' I said, speaking more sharply than was usual, perhaps because I'd had a particularly sore time of it with Sara. ‘You're supposed to be helping me to marry the mistress, not bedding the mistress's maid yourself!' After all this whole enterprise was his idea.

But you couldn't get a word out of Azarias that he didn't want to give. He just grinned at me in a manner which I might have found insolent if it didn't also somehow hurt. I had come to think of Azarias as more of a friend than a servant but now, seeing him grin like that, I was tempted to remind him of his place again. Only this time I couldn't quite bring myself to it.

That evening it was a brilliant sunset. I had not paid much attention to such things in the past but the shock of meeting Sara had altered me. I went for a walk alone outside, to enjoy the cool air after the heat of the day but also, let me admit it, to consider whether I had done the right
thing in asking for Sara's hand in marriage. Kish was out with me—oh, and that was another thing. Kish did not like Sara. From his first sight of her he had bared his teeth and growled a low disconcerting growl; it was out of character and I confess it troubled me. That dislike of Kish's was preying on my mind too—though one should not look to one's dog to choose one's wife!

I had thrown Kish a stick and he had come bounding back with it in his mouth and I was preparing to throw it a second time. My hand was poised over my head, ready to throw, and Kish was panting in anticipation, when I happened to look across to Sara's chamber-window in the high tower.

There was an oil-lamp lit within and a figure came to the casement and looked out. For a second I thought it was Sara and was considering whether to risk more rejection and wave to her. Then I saw it was not Sara at all, although certainly it was her chamber. It was Azarias I had seen at the window.

Have you ever had your world turned upside down? I lost my known world in that moment in which it appeared Azarias had played me false. My betrothed wife with my manservant! Kish came yapping up and I did something which it shames me to tell: I kicked Kish hard in the flank so that he gave a sharp yelp and scurried off with his tail between his legs. I felt a rat. A rat and an ass and a cuckold to boot (if you can be cuckolded before a woman is yet your own). So that is why, I thought, angrily, Azarias wanted me to
offer for her in marriage—to beat a path for his own entrance into my property!

Kish's bark must have alerted Azarias because when I looked again across the water he had stayed at the window and was looking out. Suddenly he saw me and I felt my face begin to colour—Noah knows why, but I felt for him, being found out in his master's mistress's chamber. But to my utter astonishment the man seemed not to be discomfited at all. Instead he gave a wave of his long hand and even that distance across the water I swear I could see that blessed smile!

J
ulia had not walked back to the Campo Angelo Raffaele. The sun was already too warm, she felt wrung out and exhausted and after the talk with Sarah she wanted brandy and a bath. Waiting for the various
vaporetti,
by which she made her way back across the city, she allowed nothing to penetrate her unthoughts.

It was a relief, after the dreadful, unwelcome intimacy, to reach the security of her apartment and she sat on the sofa for a while simply looking out of the window, too tired even to fetch the brandy bottle. It was Saturday and she could hear Nicco and his friends outside playing football. I don't want to go, she thought. This is my home. I don't want to leave
here. But her ‘home' was where Signora Mignelli's new tenants were arriving on Monday evening. Severely she reproved herself. You can't have whatever you want. Life isn't like that! Not even for Sarah who had had, she presumed, what she wanted with Carlo.

It took only a short time to pack her suitcase. The unworn lilac dress and the silk underwear she wrapped in tissue and laid on top of the black skirt and cream blouse. She had purchased an additional bag, a voluminous navy affair, in one of the cut-price shops near the Rialto, and into this she placed the overflow accumulated during her stay: some winter woollies, shoes, her wash-bag, a spare towel, Harriet's hat, some papers and her books. That left only the book about the Apocrypha and other ancient Jewish writings, too bulky for her luggage, to deal with.

Randomly, now, she opened the large volume which Vera, with unexpected good humour, had lugged all that way from London. There were other books of sacred Jewish writings printed at the back:

The Book of Enoch, she read. So those were the ‘seven angels'. Whatever were ‘spirits who sin in spirit'? And Raguel ‘who takes vengeance on the world of luminaries' (why did the sun and moon and stars need vengeance taken on them?)—wasn't ‘Raguel' also the name of the father of the girl who kills off her men in the Book of Tobit? The slight red volume of the Apocrypha was visible on the top of the navy bag and opened readily at the now familiar story:

Those were simpler times, when a girl's malice could be referred to as an evil spirit. But in the story the holy angel Raphael came to heal the possessed girl.

The phone rang, making her jump.

‘Hello,' said Sarah. ‘It's me. Look, when do you have to be out of there? Only I was wondering—would you mind if we moved your stuff tomorrow?'