Miss Garnet's Angel (3 page)

The balcony overlooked the
chiesa
but to the back of the building where the angel with the boy and the dog were not visible. Still, there was something lovely in the tawny brick and the general air of plant-encroaching dilapidation. Miss Garnet wanted to ask if the church was ever open—it had a kind of air as if it had been shut up for good—but she did not know how to broach such a topic as ‘church' with Signora Mignelli.

Instead, her landlady told her where to shop, where she might do her laundry, how to travel about Venice by the
vaporetti,
the water buses which make their ways through the
watery thoroughfares. The apartment's fridge already contained milk and butter. Also, half a bottle of
syrop,
coloured an alarming orange, presumably left by a former occupant. In the bread bin the Signora pointed out a long end of a crusty loaf and in a bowl a pyramid of green-leafed clementines. A blue glass vase on a sideboard held a clutch of dark pink anemones.

‘Oh, how pretty,' said Miss Garnet, thinking how like some painting it all looked, and blushed.

‘It is good, no?' said the Signora, pleased at the effect of her apartment. And then commandingly, ‘You have a hurt? Let me see!'

*    *    *

Miss Garnet, her knee washed and dressed by a remonstrating Signora Mignelli, spent the afternoon unpacking and rearranging the few movable pieces in the rooms. In the sitting room she removed some of the numerous lace mats, stacked together the scattered nest of small tables and relocated the antiquated telephone—for, surely, she would hardly be needing it—to an out-of-the-way marble-topped sideboard.

The bedroom was narrow, so narrow that the bed with its carved wooden headboard and pearl-white crocheted coverlet almost filled it. On the wall over the bed hung a picture of the Virgin and Christ Child.

‘Can't be doing with that,' said Miss Garnet to herself, and unhooking the picture from the wall she looked about for a place to store it. There were other pictures of religious subjects and, after consideration, the top of the ornately
fronted wardrobe in the hallway seemed a safe spot to deposit all the holy pictures.

Going to wash her hands (in spite of the high cleanliness of the rooms the pictures were dusty) she found no soap and made that a reason for her first shopping expedition.

And really it was quite easy, she thought to herself, coming out of the
farmacia
with strawberry-scented soap, because Italian sounds made sense:
farmacia,
when you heard it, sounded like pharmacy, after all.

*    *    *

After three days Miss Garnet had become surprisingly (for she was unused to forming new habits) familiar with the neighbourhood. She shopped at one of the local greengrocers who spoke English, where the stacked piles of bright fruits and vegetables appeared, to an imagination nourished among the shops of Ealing, minor miracles of texture and colour. At the husband and wife grocers, the parmigiano cheese and the wafer-sliced prosciutto made her stomach rumble in anticipation of lunch and at the bakers she dithered almost frivolously over whether to buy one of the long crusty loaves which must be consumed within a day's span or the olive-bread, doughy and moist, which lasted if wrapped tight in a polythene bag.

Miss Garnet had not, so far, done more than wander around the neighbourhood and sleep. Before her departure she had gone to Stanfords of Covent Garden where she had purchased a learned-looking book,
Venice for Historians
by the Reverend Martin Crystal, MA (Oxon.). A brief survey suggested
the content was sensibly historical and in view of the MA (Oxon.) she was prepared to overlook the title of ‘Reverend'. But when with a sense of sober preparation she opened the Reverend Crystal, on more than one occasion she found herself falling asleep. She was rather ashamed of this new tendency for sleeping: nine or ten hours a night and, in addition, often a doze in the early afternoon, but nothing worked to abate it. In an effort to rise at eight, she set her alarm and woke at ten to find, defiant in half-sleep, she had depressed the switch to turn the ringer off. After that she succumbed to the narcolepsy and allowed it to overtake her.

It was after one such heavy afternoon doze that Miss Garnet woke to voices in the
campo
outside. Pulling on a cardigan she went to the window. A procession. Children running, singing, blowing speakers like rude tongues and toy trumpets; mothers with babies in their arms and older children in pushchairs. Amid them, magnificent in scarlet, blue and gold, walked three crowned kings.

One of the kings turned back towards her window and she recognised him. It was the tallest of the three boys who had helped her on her first day. She had half looked for the boys since. Seeing one of them now gave her her first sense of belonging. The boy-king smiled and waved up at her and she tried to open the window to the balcony. But, oh how maddening, it was stuck. She wrestled with the catch, pulled and wrenched, swore quite violently and had torn her thumbnail before she heaved her way outside and onto the balcony.

But the procession had left the
campo
and the last edges of it were already trailing over the brick bridge which crossed the Rio dell'Angelo Raffaele.

‘Damn, damn, damn.' Miss Garnet was almost in tears at the disappointment of having missed the spectacle. She wondered if she ran downstairs at once and across the square after them all whether she could perhaps catch up with the colourful parade. But she felt fearful of making a fool of herself.

The loss of the procession produced a sudden drop in Miss Garnet's mood. She had been proud of her acquisition of local information which had produced a competence she had not foreseen. The regular, easy trips to the shops had begun already to create for her a stability, a base which had taken thirty-five years to build in Ealing. But now, the image of the smiling scarlet-robed boy, who had conducted her so courteously to Signora Mignelli's, threatened that security. Miss Garnet was not given to fancifulness but she felt almost as if the boy had picked up a stone from the dusty floor of the
campo
and hurled it deliberately at her. The laughing and chattering of the locals had about it the sharp ring of exclusion. It was not, she was sure, that they intended to exclude her—the few days Miss Garnet had already spent were sufficient to establish that these were not excluding people—but that she was entirely ignorant of what was of real importance to them. The event that had passed so vividly over the bridge had some meaning, to be sure, but what that meaning was remained a blank to her.

There was no refuge in a return to the soft, sagging bed from which she had recently awakened. She had slept too much already and the heavy-limbed lethargy, which had become familiar and acceptable, was replaced by a different quality of heaviness. Unpractised at introspection Miss Garnet nevertheless began to suspect she might be missing Harriet. The faint insight stirred a desire for physical activity.

Miss Garnet, who had been enjoying what Harriet would have called ‘pottering about', had so far not ventured beyond the area around the Campo Angelo Raffaele. But now she felt it was time to assert her position as visitor. It was naive to pretend, as she had been doing, that in so short a space of time she had somehow ‘fitted in'. She was a foreigner, after all, and here principally to see and learn about the historic sights of Venice.

The light afternoon was filled with mist, and Miss Garnet hesitated a moment before taking down Harriet's hat. ‘A third of body heat is lost through the head,' her father, a fund of proverbial wisdoms, had used to say. It was cold and Harriet's hat, with its veil, might, after all, prove serviceable. Glancing at the looking-glass in the tall yellow wardrobe she gained a fleet impression of someone unknown: the black-spotted veil falling from the sleek crown acted as a kind of tonic to her herringbone tweed. The once unfashionably long coat, bridging the gap between one well-booted and one veiled extremity, had somehow acquired a sense of the stylish rather than the haphazard.

Miss Garnet was the reverse of vain but the sight of herself
framed in the speckled looking-glass boosted her spirits. She felt more fortified against the sudden sweeping sense of strangeness which had assailed her. Taking from the bureau drawer the map of Venice she had purchased along with the Reverend Crystal, she unfolded it to plot a route.

But where to start? The glint of introspection which had just been ignited began to illuminate an insecurity: her parochial tendencies had been born of timidity, rather than a natural aptitude with the new locality. For all its apparent clarity she found the map bewildering. One location alone had any resonance for her: the Piazza San Marco, Venice's focal point. At least she knew about that from her teaching of history. She would go to the Piazza, from where the doges had once set out to wed the seas with rings.

*    *    *

Miss Garnet had chosen one of the further reaches of the almost-island-which-is-Venice to stay in and from this remoter quarter the walk to the Piazza San Marco takes time. Despite Signora Mignelli's instructions Miss Garnet did not yet feel equal to experimenting with the
vaporetti
and besides, exercise, she felt, was what was called for. She walked purposefully along the narrow
calle
which led down to the Accademia (where, the Reverend Crystal promised, a wealth of artistic treasure awaited her). At the wooden Accademia bridge she halted. Ahead of her, like a vast soap bubble formed out of the circling, dove-coloured mists, stood Santa Maria della Salute, the church which breasts the entrance to Venice's Grand Canal.

‘Oh!' cried Miss Garnet. She caught at her throat and then at Harriet's veil, scrabbling it back from her eyes to see more clearly. And oh, the light! ‘Lord, Lord,' sighed Julia Garnet.

She did not know why she had used those words as she moved off, frightened to stay longer lest the unfamiliar beauty so captivate her that she turn to stone, as she later amusingly phrased it to herself. But it was true it was a kind of fear she felt, almost as if she was fleeing some harrowing spectre who stalked her progress. Across another
campo,
then over bridges, along further alleys, past astonishing pastries piled high in gleaming windows, past shops filled with bottled liquor, alarming knives, swathes of patterned paper. Once she passed an artists' suppliers where, in spite of the spectre, she stopped to admire the window packed with square dishes heaped with brilliant coloured powders:
oro, oro pallido, argento, lacca rossa—
gold, silver, red, the colours of alchemy, thought Miss Garnet, hurrying on, for she had read about alchemy when she was teaching the Renaissance to the fifth form.

At the edge of the Piazza she halted. Let the spectre do its worst, for here was the culmination of her quest. Before her stood the campanile, the tall bell-tower, and behind it, in glimmering heaps and folds, in gilded wings and waved encrustations, emerged the outline of St Mark's. People might speak of St Mark's as a kind of dream but Miss Garnet had never known such dreams. Once, as a child, she dreamed she had become a mermaid; that was the closest she had ever come to this.

Measuring each step she walked across the Piazza. Although still afternoon the sky was beginning to darken and already a pearl fingernail clipping of moon was appearing, like an inspired throwaway gesture designed to point up the whole effect of the basilica's sheen. Reaching the arched portals Miss Garnet stopped, wondering if it was all right to go on. But it must be, look there were other tourists—how silly she was, of course one didn't have to be a Christian to enter and inspect a renowned example of Byzantine architecture.

Inside the great cathedral before her a line of people shuffled forward. Above her, and on all sides, light played and danced from a million tiny surfaces of refracted gold. A dull smell of onions disconcertingly filled her nostrils. What was it? Years of sweat, perhaps, perfusing the much-visited old air.

There appeared to be a restriction on where one might walk, for barriers and ropes were prohibiting entrances here, blocking ingress there. ‘But why are
those
people allowed?' queried Miss Garnet. For there were men and women but mostly, it must be said, the latter, moving into the great interior space from which the swaying line of visitors was debarred. She stopped before an official in navy uniform.
‘Vespero?'
he enquired and
‘Si, si,'
she found herself replying for whatever it was she was not going to be shut out a second time that day.

The official detached the wine-coloured rope from its catch and ushered the Signora in the black veil through.
‘Look, it's our little duchess,' Cynthia Cutforth exclaimed to her husband. ‘She's joining the service, she must be a Roman Catholic. See how cute she looks in her veil.'

But Miss Garnet was oblivious to all but the extraordinary surroundings in which she now found herself. Silver lamps burned dimly in the recesses. Above her and on all sides loomed strange glittering mosaic figures, in a background of unremitting gold. A succession of images—lions, lambs, flowers, thorns, eagles, serpents, dragons, doves—wove before her startled eyes a shimmering vision, awful and benign. Like blood forcing a route through long-constricted arteries a kind of wild rejoicing began to cascade through her. Stumbling slightly she made her way to a seat on the main aisle.

There was a thin stapled book of paper on the seat and picking it up she saw
‘Vespero Epifania'
. Of course! Epiphany. How stupid she had been. January the sixth was the English Twelfth Night when the Lord of Misrule was traditionally abroad and one took down one's Christmas decorations to avert ill luck. But here, in a Catholic country, the journey of the Magi, who followed the star with their gifts for the baby who was born in the manger, was still celebrated. That was the meaning of the three kings who had graced the Campo Angelo Raffaele that afternoon.