Miss Garnet's Angel (32 page)

After Vera's determined pessimism it was fun taking a taxi to St Martin's Lane. There was a bookshop she wanted to visit—one she had seen in passing on her occasional trips to the Coliseum with Harriet. Dear Harriet! They had sat in the amphitheatre—‘the Armpit', Harriet had called it, on account of the sweat-inducing heat, and eaten home-made cheese and pickle sandwiches and drunk tea from a flask in the interval. And all the while Harriet had been a wealthy woman. She would be glad about the taxi.

Later that night, the traffic making the pale pink hotel furnishings judder (like blancmange, Julia thought), she ordered tea and sandwiches from Room Service—in memory of Harriet.

She hadn't looked at her old Atlas of the Ancient World (removed from under Vera's bed) since her student days, and opening it and finding Nimrod she felt a pulse of pleasure. This was how she had felt when, as a schoolgirl, she had planned her escape from her father's house by reading history at university. Below Nimrod, a short way south down the River Tigris, she found Nineveh, Tobit's city, or rather the one he was forced to inhabit after his conquerors had annihilated Israel. So this was Assyria? But it got its comeuppance in the end, for Nineveh was taken by the Medes and their allies the subtle Persians, and like the ten tribes of vanquished Israel it too vanished to become history. Old Tobit would have been pleased!

Turning the page to find the Persian Empire she found a bus ticket: 3d—the price of a ride along the Cambridge ‘backs'. Thruppence. She had forgotten the little twelve-sided coins with the clump of thrift, or the portcullis of the Bank of England, on the back. A coin you used to give to children who were good, or for washing your windows or fetching coal. You lived as though a way of life would last for ever, and when it went, it vanished, even from your own memory.

But her Tobias—where had he travelled? With her finger she followed down the Tigris. Ecbatana, the capital of Media,
Sara's home, was well east of Assyria, over the Zagros Mountains, and nowadays it seemed to be the town of Hamadan. And Raghes, by the Caspian Sea, where Tobias was to collect the family debt, looked as if it might have become the modern city of Tehran.

Opening the door of the fridge-bar she took out a miniature brandy and unscrewed the cap, imagining what her father would make of his daughter ‘taking', as he would have put it, ‘to the devil drink'?
‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom!'
he had said, striking her across the shoulders, as she sat, refusing him the satisfaction of seeing her weep. The Proverbs of old Tobit's God, Yahweh.
‘The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways,'
portentously her father had also uttered, not at all understanding, she guessed (and feeling, at this, the need to pour more brandy), what those words might mean.

*    *    *

The twins were to be married in Devon and on the train (first-class, courtesy of Harriet) Julia read the book she had found at the bookshop near St Martin's Lane. Gaspar, Mel-chior and Balthasar, she learned, were all a Christian fancy. The Magi, it turned out, were not kings at all but from the priestly tribe of the Medes, who did not consider a journey to a humble oxen's stall beneath their sacerdotal dignity. Their gold and frankincense and myrrh would have been ritual gifts, appropriate to the saviour born of a virgin whose birth was predicted by their prophet, Zoroaster. And Zoroaster's holy city proved to be none other than Raghes!

Excitement gripped her heart, making it flutter and jump. There, she knew it! That was why Tobit wanted his son to go there to collect a debt. What was a debt anyway? Something of yourself you needed to have restored. And it was Raphael, after all, who collected the debt from Raghes in the end. Unconsciously, the old boy must have known a change of heart was the Tobit family's best hope! No wonder the funny, charming story, that had so impressed the artists of Venice, was excluded from the Protestant Bible: it was not really a Jewish morality tale at all but something far older—kinder, in fact. In her notebook, bracing it against the train's centripetal force, she wrote:
The Zoroastrian priests of Media (later Persia) would bring a dog to the bedside of a dying man—for him to feed the dog a morsel and so be led by it safely after death across the Bridge of Separation to be judged.

Here she stopped and thought about judgement. The laughing Zoroaster apparently believed our world was a battleground between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Perhaps he was right. It no longer made sense to her to think in the old rigid pre-Venice days about ‘good' and ‘bad' but maybe life was a matter of having to makes choices. (Though how did you know which was which? And how had she fared in that test?)

And the Nasu—that seemed to be the Persian name for the corpse-spirit, the executive of evil. The dog—which didn't make Jewish sense—she understood, now, why it was there. The train was fairly hurtling along so she took her notebook onto her lap, cradling it.

If the Median part of the Tobit story is, as I think, really Zoroastrian, that explains why the dog is there—to rid the girl of the destructive spirit which has got into her.

She thought a bit more, then wrote:
The dog is there to smell out death and the death-dealing spirit. So the dog has two functions: (i) he represents natural instinct—Tobit lacks this which makes him morbid but his son has it in abundance, which is why (with the right help) he can sexually penetrate the girl where others have failed; (ii) the dog leads to life after death—whether physical death or death of a moribund way of being (i.e. the girl's and Tobit's).

But, of course, we all have a spirit of destruction in us, reflected Julia Garnet, as the train swayed into, then braked at, Totnes station.

*    *    *

If the notion of a synagogue had ever been raised it had been discarded, for the wedding was to take place in a church close to Sarah's family home. Whatever was Jewish in Sarah had been overlaid by the Anglicanism of her father's family.

And perhaps that is as it should be—out of respect, Julia decided, smoothing the skirts of her lilac dress as she extricated herself from the taxi and rearranging Harriet's cream silk shawl around her shoulders as she took in the Englishness of the churchyard before her.

The wedding passed off as weddings do: the church was picturesque with its square Norman tower and wagon-vault roof; the vicar's sermon was affable, the hymns cheerful and Sarah looked fetching in lace. But there was none of the mystery and passion, nothing of the anguish and drama (which
is, Julia speculated, surely also the prerogative of marriage) she had found in the Venetian services. Half way through the ceremony she became conscious that she was disappointed. Everything was in good taste, but the sum of it was insipid.

It is all too
pink,
she decided later: the salmon, the raspberries—even the vicar, who had divested himself of his dog-collar and was demonstrating his pliancy by jiving with one of the ladies in charge of the tea. Lucky her departure on the following day had given her an excuse to leave early.

‘Forgive me,' she said, going across to Toby. ‘It has been marvellous, but I'm getting old and I have a train to catch.'

‘You're not old, Julia—you look dishy in that dress. I'd marry you myself if I weren't hitched up with a beautiful woman already.'

‘Flatterer!' For the first time in her life Julia flirted back.

‘No, really, I'm serious. I won't forget our midnight walk.'

‘Hardly midnight!'

‘Well, dawn walk, whatever. Don't be such a schoolmarm! Look, I've never said—'

‘Well don't!' Julia was crisp. ‘Least said soonest mended, if you want me to be a schoolmarm. Anyway, I have a present for you both. I couldn't find anything I thought you would like so I've got you something I like instead.' She handed him a flat package.

‘If you're really off I'm going to open it. I should wait for Sarah but looks like she's tied up with Uncle Herb.'

Julia looked across the field to where the marquee was pitched. Sarah stood at the entrance, her arm round a short,
powerful-looking man with a top hat and long grey hair. ‘Goodness, he looks terrifying! He's your mother's brother?'

She had been introduced to Sarah's mother, a grey-haired, sparrow-boned woman who looked as if she was struggling between grief and joy. And her husband, Sarah's father, Toby's Uncle Bill, was he around somewhere to see his only daughter safe at last? Or had that astonishing remediate gaze in the chapel dissolved all remnant of darkness before it?

But (giving herself the faintest peremptory shake) this she was never likely to know; such a matter was for the privacy of the marriage bed. ‘Half-brother,' Toby cut in. ‘Grandma married twice. He's OK. Rich as Croesus. It's thanks to his wonga we're able to do the chapel.'

‘I remember you said. What made the money?'

‘Cocktail biscuits,' said Toby and, explosively, they both started to laugh.

‘Biscuits and pizzas!' Julia, holding on to the arm Toby didn't have round her, had to resort to Harriet's handkerchief. ‘The modern mainstays of restoration.' Then, more soberly—the slight tension dissipated—‘She's all right, then, your Sarah?'

Toby, tanned, looked well. His shoulders had straightened out, become broader, somehow. Shading his eyes to look across to his wife he said, ‘We have our days but she's riding again, which I reckon's good for her.'

In her mind's eye Julia saw the long, intelligent noses of the bronze horses of St Mark's. ‘Much better, I should think, than any “therapy”!'

‘Hey!' Toby had unwrapped the parcel to reveal a red-bound book. ‘The Apocrypha. This looks cool!'

‘I thought you might like to read the Book of Tobit. We nearly spoke of it once and, well, you'll maybe see why I like it.'

‘Hey,' said Toby. ‘Then I guess we'll like it too!'

*    *    *

The sun had retreated by the time Julia reached Plymouth station and she was grateful for Harriet's shawl. The buffet was closed so she couldn't even have a cup of tea and she had to make do with the comforts of her book until the train arrived. When it did she banged her shin on the step up to the carriage and, rubbing it, recalled the day she had arrived in Venice and met Cynthia and Charles. It was England where she felt a stranger now.

Her eyes were tired and she had some difficulty finding her seat number so that when she at last plumped down with her back to the engine (a placing which did not best please her) she did not immediately observe the dark-haired girl opposite.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?'

Julia, who had withdrawn into her book, looked up to see that it was her fellow passenger who was asking the question. ‘How kind of you—I'm fairly parched.'

‘Well, if you wouldn't mind guarding my things I'll get us both one, unless there's anything else you would like?'

Julia thanked her but declined anything but tea. Within minutes the girl was back, carefully carrying the two beakers
in their plastic handles. ‘Disgusting looking, I'm afraid—bright orange but at least it wets the whistle.'

‘My father used to say that!' The girl's friendliness was unexpectedly soothing.

‘Did he? That's funny, mine does still. Cheers!' The girl smiled and raised a beaker towards Julia who drank gratefully. The day had been more of a drain that she had expected.

After a bit the girl said, ‘Forgive me if I'm prying but I was looking at your book.' She gestured at the book which Julia had placed, cover down, on the table between them.

‘Do look if you'd like.' Julia half-shuffled the book about the Magi towards her newly-met companion.

The girl opened the book and began to read the introduction. She handled the pages with care. Watching her Julia became conscious of a feeling she would not have recognised nine months ago: she was envious of the girl's attractiveness, her capacity to engage so easily in conversation with a stranger. It was a facility she herself had never had, would never now have and yet, as she watched herself watching the girl, she had the strangest sensation. She felt she was almost clinically observing a small insidious squib lodged inside her, which for years had poisoned her associations with others.

‘Are they the same Magi then who followed the star?'

The girl seemed really to want to know. She might have been my daughter, Julia speculated; and the unlooked-for thought was warming. ‘Yes. The same. I got oddly interested
in them because of one of the books of the Old Testament Apocrypha: the Book of Tobit. It's only partly a Jewish story—the Jews, I've been working out, took it over from something much older.'

‘Is that the one about the angel? We did it as a play at school.'

Is he here too, wondered Julia Garnet; between Plymouth and Paddington on the Great Western Railway? Perhaps he's everywhere if one cares to look.

‘Yes—there's an angel. From what I've been able to find out, the subject of the Tobit story goes back to the time of the Medes and Persians. The Medes had a priest tribe, called the Magi, who became followers of Zarathustra—Zoroaster to us. The “Good Religion” they called it.'

‘Don't all religions think they're “good”?'

‘I expect they do. But he seems particularly to have liked life, if you know what I mean? In fact, he believed we had a duty to enjoy ourselves. But he thought we had to be vigilant, too, against…' What was it? Excess and deprivation, the Iranian prophet had counselled against both—perhaps moderation in all things, including moderation, best summed it up? ‘…I suppose the things which conspire against the life-force—anger and brutality and dishonesty—he was particularly hot against that! It was the dominant religion in Iran for hundreds of years before the Muslims virtually wiped it out. A pity because it seems so sensible to me.'