Miss Garnet's Angel (33 page)

‘And the angel?'

‘There's a dog in the story I got interested in,' said Julia, not wishing to speak on the other topic. ‘The dog was part of Zoroastrian ritual, which is why Muslims hate dogs still.'

‘My father says all religious practice is founded on political utility.' The girl had long hair which she had wound up into a silver comb—like Sarah's the day they had met at the Cutforths' party.

‘I used to believe that,' said Julia, suddenly longing for the golden dimness of St Mark's. ‘But I suppose what you believe or don't believe is a choice too.'

*    *    *

‘I don't even know your name,' Julia (visited by a rogue sense of devastating loneliness) had declared as the train pulled into Paddington, and the girl had written it out, with her address, on a piece of coloured paper she had found in her bag.

Before retiring to bed in the blancmange hotel room, Julia looked at the piece of paper again to copy it into her notebook. ‘Saskia Thrale'. A memorable name. It was not likely she would ever meet the girl again; but the meeting had crystallised something for her.

S
oon for me there will be time no longer and I must make my way beneath the earth. Therefore I must at last come to tell how my son Tobias returned to me.

The Rib and I waited two moons, and I counted each
day of his journey. Every evening before sundown the Rib went out, pretending to deliver laundry—but I knew in truth she was lingering by the banks of the river, watching and waiting.

Until a day came when I lost patience (it was ever my besetting sin) and I turned to her and said, ‘Is my kinsman dead and no man there to give them the money or what is it?'

At this the Rib started up. ‘My son is dead. Now I care for nothing. I have let go the light of my eyes.' And so on.

‘Hold your peace,' I said, angry that she was giving voice to my own fears. ‘Doubtless they have been detained by some distracting business.'

But she would take no comfort from me and went out every day sorrowing and I pictured her following with her eyes the road they had gone. However much I tried to assure her our son was safe, in my own mind he had perished and all her searching after him was chaff before the wind. There would be none who would care for the Rib after I was gone nor no one to bury my body in the earth away from the jaws of the carrion-eaters. And I cried as King David did, ‘O my son, my son!'

But there came a day when the Rib went out to the banks of the Tigris and came running home, shouting.

I stepped out from my place in the porch to the courtyard wall. ‘It's him,' she was calling. ‘I saw them. Him and that man who went with him. Tobias is home. They'll be with us soon.'

Suddenly at my feet and around my legs I felt a warmth and then a dampness pressing itself against my calf. It was that blessed dog back again! I could feel the way he pricked his ears sharp, and the wagging of his tail.

And I swear I felt the coming of them too, through the arched passageway into the courtyard, as if it was the first day—my boy and the man who went beside him; for ever before my boy spoke to me I had called out to him, ‘Tobias, son of my heart,' and I stepped away from the wall out towards him, and stumbled, my arms open to enfold him, my best treasure—an old man and blind.

I heard one word as I stumbled into the dark, ‘Father,' and then ‘Courage, Father!' and a vile stinging in my eyes and a foul stench, such that I almost vomited and I lost consciousness and fell to the ground.

And then a tall dark young man, with a beard, was helping me up, and wiping my face and pulling something away from my eyes and I saw I had a clutch of purple leaves in my fist and a broad fair man stood aside of him; and the young man with the beard said again, ‘Father.' Then he added, ‘See! I have come home again!'

I
n October the rains came and those who knew the significance of such matters cast calculating eyes at the mark on the base of the campanile in the Piazza which measures the height the waters reached on November 4, 1966.

Acqua alta,
the curse of Venice, for the waters which rise ever higher from the levels of the lagoon become lethal when driven by a following wind. In the Piazza San Marco the raised trestles, by which visitors and natives make their tottering or practised way round the square, were already in place.

Julia had accepted an invitation to dine with the Monsignore. She had set out and returned to put on green rubber boots, the hallmark of those native to the city. Before she
turned into the Calle Lunga, she stopped to post some letters. So that was done; Mr Mills would be pleased.

A yellow crane, supported on a wide red barge, was sinking piles into the water. Men in thick leather gloves and woollen hats hauled and steadied the piles, beating them deep into the bed of the canal with tremendous mallets. Another passer-by called out a joshing greeting to one of the men who had recently married. Some banter ensued concerning the amount of time the bridegroom had been spending in bed. Listening amused, Julia realised that she understood the gist of what the men were saying.

Along the familiar route over the Accademia bridge (she could walk it, she had written to Vera—trying to make amends for the visit—in her dreams) she met the woman in the emerald hat whom she had last seen in the little chapel of St Mark's. The woman, gleaming in patent boots, bestowed a regal nod of recognition as they passed.

‘You come prepared for the deluge!'

She had taken off her boots and the priest had taken her, in her stockinged feet (too late she remembered she had forgotten slippers) into a study which resembled a painting she had first seen with Carlo.

‘Thank you for these.' She deposited a parcel of books on the table. ‘This is like St Augustine's cell!'

‘Too big a compliment. I fear I do not have the saint's resistance to his own shadow. But Marco, here, is a model for Augustine's dog!' The pug had come wheezing forward to greet her.

Julia bent down to reciprocate. ‘I've been doing some detective work on dogs. Do you know, I used not to like them.'

They dined in his panelled hall—pigeon cooked with peas in rich gravy, the crystal glasses tawny with wine.

‘The wine of the Veneto for winter,' said the Monsignore, refilling her glass. ‘Good for the belly and the heart.'

‘And the spirit?'

‘That too. But better not talk too much about the spirit. It is shy.' He spoke as if of a quick-hearing presence. ‘However, tonight we might make a toast, you and I.'

‘Of course?'

‘Ottobre ventiquattro—
The Feast of Raphael—that is until some imbecile in the Vatican dumps it in with Michaelmas! But always before, today is his feast; and myself I always honour him this day.' He raised his glass to her across the table.

So that was why she had been invited. She raised her glass in answer and they drank in silence.

‘The books you kindly lent me'—she had become quite a regular in his library—‘you know, I think he'—she did not like to speak the name—‘is far older than the Old Testament even.'

Oh, Raphael, thousands of years ago, on the high grasslands by the Caspian Sea, ever before there was a Moses or a Christ or a Mohammed, was it you who showed the laughing Zoroaster his vision of a world poised between truth and lies?

If she had hoped for surprise from him she would have been disappointed. ‘But of course, such as these have always been; since the beginning. It makes sense!'

Marco, from his place by the fire, came across to her chair and she offered him a scrap of pigeon. ‘Do you mind my feeding him? Sorry, I should have asked.' The priest, who had been staring into the fire, only shook his head. ‘I expect you knew this, but I didn't, that dogs were sacred once. I have been wondering if that's why, you know, there's a dog with him in the painting?'

The Monsignore, turning back, began to help himself to cheese. ‘I wish you would take some of this Provolone. Or the Gorgonzola is excellent with the wine. It is an odd dog, this one in the Tobiolo story. The only good dog in the scriptures. But as you say these stories are far older than our religions.'

He seemed not to wish to say more but there was something which had bothered Julia and, obstinate, she pressed. ‘Monsignore Giuseppe, what happened to the other part of the diptych?' Sometimes in the night she woke puzzling. Had the companion picture gone with all the other undiscovered treasures with the Nazis? Or had Sarah stolen that too? Was it still in Carlo's possession, waiting for an opportunity for him to sell it to some discreet millionaire? Yet Toby had spoken only of discovering the angel panel—had said nothing of its other half. ‘Do you think it will ever turn up?'

‘You are troubled for the picture or for yourself?'

Would the angel panel be able to ‘cure', now it was buffered by the sleek powers of modern security and no longer in the safe quiet of the little chapel? So far as she knew the priest had never disclosed to anyone but her that it was he
who had hidden the diptych in the passage. An idea began to quicken in her mind—perhaps the other part was still…? but the blackbird eyes were looking levelly and her half-formed question died away.

‘Some more wine?' He offered the decanter. ‘Then I will finish it. I never tell you, I think, my story about Pope John.'

‘The day you told me about…?' They had never spoken of what he had seen in the chapel either.

‘Just so. All popes are appointed by God but some, let us say, come to us more as His friends. For myself having known Pope John, I learn a little more about the force of light. You understand?'

Marco snuffled at her chair and she fed him a piece of bacon. ‘I think so.'

‘He was, you see, always'—the Monsignore made a gesture with his fingers as if crumbling pastry—
‘light
himself. So, I tell you: it is one time in Paris and Pope John is invited to a dinner. Sophia Loren and her husband Carlo Ponti are also invited—to give His Holiness some company from home, I suppose, because being a peasant Pope John speaks only Italian. Miss Loren is a little late—a habit of hers—and when she arrives she is very décolleté. But very! And at once around her, from all the people from the Vatican, there is an atmosphere.' The eyes looked malicious glee. ‘After a while Pope John says, “I feel sorry for Signora Ponti—she is dressed so charmingly. But when she enter the room no one looks at her—all of you look instead at me! Where are your manners, gentlemen?”'

The Monsignore rose from the table. ‘Do you feel like a little promenade? Marco had better accompany us. You are getting fat, Marco, like your master, and the
dottore
tells me we must pay attention to the heart. No need, I think, for your muzzle tonight.'

The moon was full and hung over the shallow lake which the
acqua alta
had made of the Piazza San Marco. Not another soul was in sight to witness the liquid silver on the water's surface.

‘You see,' said the Monsignore, ‘one of the truly lovely sights of Venice and also the most dangerous.'

Carlo had shown her the height reached by the last flood—a jot below his own. ‘See,' he had said. ‘If I had been standing there the waters would almost have covered me!'—and she had wanted to cover him instead with her own body.

‘Someone told me that it was only because of the time of the year that the city was saved.' The time of the neap tides, Carlo had explained, when the gravitational force of the sun and moon pull in opposite directions. ‘The floods are becoming more frequent?'

‘Certainly. The ice is melting at the pole and adds daily to the level of the sea. And each day Venice sinks by just so much of a fraction.' In the moonlight she saw him move his hand in a gesture of annihilation.

‘But is there nothing can be done?'

‘Oh yes. They say gates can be constructed to keep out the water which blows across the Adriatic. But I wonder if we can ever really turn back the tide.'

He turned back towards the lagoon. ‘I will call my boatman to escort you back to the Angelo Raffaele.' She was about to say it was unnecessary when he laid a restraining hand on her arm. ‘No, no. Do not protest. It is my pleasure. You know you were talking of the old religions? Everything has its time. All of this…' he waved backwards at the drenched vista of the Piazza ‘…was once green fields and vineyards and a canal ran beside the church which was St Theodore's, before Marco's body was brought to put his nose out of joint. Like so much of Venice, he too was stolen from the East!'

Julia looked up at the displaced saint with his crocodile. A rhyme the children at school had used to chant in the playground was running in her mind.
See you later alligator
—
In a while crocodile.
She pictured the anonymous author of the Book of Tobit, perhaps in Egypt, writing down on his papyrus the tales of the Persian soldiers as they visited the Egyptian garrison, and mixing them in with his own race's pieties. A ‘splendour of miscellaneous spirits' Ruskin had called Venice. He might as well have meant civilisation! A hotch-potch, anyway. Perhaps the crocodile had travelled from Egypt along with the body of the Evangelist? ‘He was the Patriarch of Alexandria, wasn't he—Mark?' It was the only piece of information she had retained from the Reverend Crystal.