Miss Garnet's Angel (28 page)

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.

T
hey 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 some? 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.

What had really occurred the morning she had seen Carlo leave Sarah's apartment? Toby's account had convinced her that whatever it was she had drawn a false conclusion. It was her own mind which had woven the net she had become entangled in—which was only justice, when you thought about it—though it didn't, to be sure, say much for her mind! When you point a finger, Harriet had said to her once during an argument, remember there are three fingers pointing back at you! (A remark which she had dismissed at the time as ‘Tosh!') She couldn't even remember what the row was about. Stella's cat-litter, she thought. And now Harriet was dead and beyond apology. The book she had been reading suggested that the story of Tobit might include remnants of a legend called The Grateful Dead—which she half recalled as the name of a band the children at school had gone crazy over. How could the dead express gratitude? Harriet could not be grateful to her any more—only she could be grateful to Harriet.

They walked on in silence past the Papadopoli Gardens. Julia wanted to ask if she could take Toby's arm; the ache in her hip had become more severe. But he walked on, always
slightly ahead, with a remoteness she felt too diffident to breach. Why did old Tobit care so much about the dead bodies which lay about in Nineveh? Why not let the wild dogs strip the corpses' bones? To have one's body devoured by nature's hunters didn't seem such a bad thing.

They had come to the bridge which crosses the Rio Nuovo and Julia put out her hand to halt Toby. ‘Would you mind? I need to catch my breath.'

‘Sure.' He stood against the bridge, rolling another cigarette.

I'm glad I do not have children, Julia thought, watching him. Impossible not to mind when they did themselves harm.

The sky was beginning to flush as they turned into a tiny
calle
which came out by the bridge across to the exotic Carmini—where Carlo had shown her the Cima altarpiece: another version of Tobias and Raphael, respectful attendants on the infant Christ who lies, tiny and naked, among admiring shepherds in the gold-leafed countryside of Cima's Conegliano. The artist has painted Tobias as a mere child, an open-faced boy who carries the fish with him as a proud boast to his pals and not as a powerful remedy against devils. Julia's mind wandered absurdly to Sarah's fridge and the tin of anchovies. Maybe they should have brought it with them—as expedient against more modern forms of evil!

They walked on along the canal which becomes the Rio dell'Angelo Raffaele. The site of the Chapel-of-the-Plague lay across the water.

Halfway along the
fondamenta
Julia stopped. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I seem to have a stitch now. I'm getting to be a hopeless walking companion.'

‘It's OK.'

They were close to where the nobleman's palazzo would have been. ‘Toby, do you know the story of the Chapel?'

‘Yeah. It was built for a woman who survived the plague.'

‘But did you know she was a Jewess? At least, that's what a friend of mine told me.' It was all right to call the Monsignore a friend.

‘Hey, that's cool! Technically, me and Sarah's Jewish 'cos our mums are. It's Uncle Herb, their half-brother, who's put up most of the money for the Chapel. Herbie the Wallet, Sarah calls him. That's how we're on the case. They only use Venetian restorers, usually.'

‘You should be flattered.'

Across the water, according to the Monsignore's story, was where the young Levantine must have stood, patiently hoping for sight of his mortally sick beloved. Now, six and a half centuries later, she was there in the company of another lover. But the object of his love—where was she?