Miss Garnet's Angel (6 page)

I
am an old man near the end of my life—although my son lies and protests this is not so. (He is a good son, in spite of the lies.) You may ask what an old man of one hundred and eighty-five years can have to say to interest you? The secret of my longevity, perhaps? Well, it may be that our years are not reckoned as you reckon yours. But even allowing for differences I would say we live close to the cycle of the sun and moon, we rise and go to bed with the birds, labour hard, eat frugally and these things conspire towards longevity; but I will hazard there is another thing more important than these: it may be we may live long because there is something we value above human life—I shall not give it a name!

Among our people the old are respected for their wisdom—I hope it may be the same with yours. However it is with you, if you are young now you might hold it in your mind that one day you too will be old and may find yourself glad then to be heard; if you are already old, perhaps like me you already have a story to tell (for all lives, I think, have some sort of a story in them)? Yet I do not tell my own because I wish it, or because I wish to instruct you in how to live, though I'll admit that might once have been
my purpose. No, I tell you this because I was told to tell it—by what you might call ‘a higher authority'—and truth is, the thought of how to tell it has taxed me for many years.

I promised so long ago to set all this down but you know how it is when you make a promise? There is that small serpent voice inside which says, ‘No need to bother about it now,' or ‘Later will do better,' or (most true in my case) ‘Give me time to understand.' Thinking leads to a kind of weighing of words which holds back action. But now I feel the shadow or the Angel of Death upon me and I do not think I have much more time.

At first it was not only that I did not understand but that I did not even know
how
to begin to understand. What happened to me and my family was so remarkable that I believed I should bungle the telling of it. But I was only a third through my life when these events took place. Nowadays I have come to see that bungling is what all of us do; perhaps bungling is what we are here for?

I would like to begin at the beginning if I only knew when the ‘beginning' starts. Some might say it was when we were first fashioned out of the mud of the great River Tigris, before our wives were pulled out of our ribs to create a source of perpetual reproof to us! (That is my little joke: I call my wife, Anna, ‘Rib'; I have an idea this oft-repeated joke of mine annoys her but she is a generous woman and mostly puts up with her husband's trying ways.)

Or maybe the ‘beginning' was later, when our first parents
lost their paradise (which some say was here between the two rivers, which the traders still call ‘garden' on account of its great fertileness) and had to make their way in the world? From the time of our first parents our people were wanderers—until the patriarch Abram came from Ur into the land which was then called Canaan. Later our people found their way into Egypt—and out again, through the vision of Moses, who we call ‘Liberator', by a path through the Sea-of-Reeds. In time we returned to the land which was promised us, provided we did not ‘play the harlot' with other gods.

In those days the twelve tribes inhabited two kingdoms and there was bad feeling between the northern country and the south. Perhaps northerners will always be slow to toe the line where the south is concerned? Among the northern tribes there were many who did play the harlot. In my own young days already my own tribe of Naphtali had begun to sacrifice in secret to the old gods (more persuadable than our own with gifts of oil or barley) and I alone travelled to the kingdom in the south, to Jerusalem, the holy city, to the temple with the brazen pillars, the ornaments of gold and ivory and lapis lazuli, and the walls lined in cedar-wood from Lebanon by Solomon, son of David, who ruled over both our kingdoms. I alone kept faith and went with my first fruits and firstlings and the first shearings of sheep and one tithe of all my corn and wine and oil and pomegranates; but my kin openly gave their tithes to the heifer Baal, and in the end my own tribe
was led captive, to Nineveh, in the land of Assyria, and the other tribes were scattered among the far cities of Media, a proverb of reproach to all the nations among whom we are dispersed. But you see, from the first it was our way to be sojourners and strangers!

W
hen Julia Garnet looked back on this period of her life she remembered it as a time in which she discovered excitement. The concert to which Carlo took her, that first evening, was in an old
scuola,
with dark, painted ceilings, coffered, gilded and carved. She sat listening to Vivaldi, Albinoni, Corelli—triumphant musical spirits of Venice—played by a quintet of pretty girls in long frocks and wild-haired young men.

The musicians looked too young to understand the gaiety of the music they played. Yet when they attacked their fiddles, their violas and their cellos they communicated an energetic vibrancy which sent the blood around the body leaving one, Julia Garnet reflected, positively tingling.
Thinking of the dismally picked-out hymns of her childhood piano lessons she became humble. ‘I could never have played like that!' She stood, slightly chilly, in the marble hall during the interval. Beside them, around white Venetian necks, luxuriated copious fur tippets and wraps.

‘This I do not believe.' Carlo took off his jacket and whisked it, with the adroitness of a matador, around her shoulders and when she tried to demur: ‘No, no,' smiling as ever, ‘this is our Venetian way. The woman is for cherishing!'

This was the first of many outings—more than she could ever have believed anyone would want to take with her, let alone this tall, cultivated man who—though nearing seventy, he assured her—was, in the old-fashioned style, undeniably handsome. Sometimes they would go to a concert and afterwards they would dine at one of many out-of-the-way restaurants where he was greeted like a long-lost son; or he would suggest a visit to a church where in rich glooms he pointed out altarpieces with obscure stories from the Catholic scriptures, unknown to Protestant histories; or he steered her, always charmingly holding the crook of her arm, through rooms of the Accademia, where she learned to look at painters whose names were formerly not even names to her, Bassano, Longhi, Vivarini. Their reds and golds and blues, in tones she had been used to deriding as ‘showy' (for the paintings of Lowry had formerly been her highest notion of art), somewhat dazed her eyes. In one room she stopped, overcome by the eight great canvases which lined the four walls. ‘Carpaccio,' he said, amused at her evident delight.
‘Carpaccio, I always say, is the prosecco among painters—he is another of our Venetian secrets!'

One of the canvases in particular held her attention: a high, square room infiltrated with a quiet dawn light; on one side of the painting a simple bed, with a woman tranquilly asleep—opposite, at the threshold of a lighted door, an angel in blue with dusky wings, just standing. Looking at the angel waiting with such stillness, Julia Garnet felt something like a small shudder pass through her.

On another occasion, at the Peggy Guggenheim museum, he had made her blush horribly by pointing out the tumescent angel who exposes his proud member in all its glory to the passing watercraft. (‘Oh, I assure you, it unscrews when visitors from the church come!') Afterwards he had bought her marigolds from a narrow shop crammed with flowers, and she knew it was by way of apology for having embarrassed her. That night she lay awake, hating herself for her damnable strait-laced upbringing, so that by morning she had schooled herself not to expect him (for how could so urbane a man put up with such unsophistication in a grown woman?). But he had appeared, as usual, across the
campo,
smiling as if nothing had happened, and her heart had turned over and over in joy as she stood waving from the balcony.

Once she had succumbed to a fit of sneezing and he had pressed his handkerchief upon her, warm from his trouser pocket. She had tried not to use it, trusting to his impeccable manners not to ask for its return, aware already that later she
would put it away unwashed in her drawer beside the book which pressed one of the embarrassing marigolds.

Although she kept his card in her handbag, she held back, unwilling to put his desire to see her to the test, from ever initiating their meetings. And yet he gave ample proofs of seeking out the friendship.

Usually it was the afternoons when Carlo would come by looking for her. Signora Mignelli, made familiar by the leveller of sex, got to teasing her about her ‘friend'.

In Carlo's company Julia Garnet felt herself become more feminine: she bought a black skirt and a daringly wide-lapelled cream silk blouse—to wear at the concerts. She even patrolled the back streets, half-looking for an emerald hat such as she had seen on the woman in the little chapel in St Mark's, but found nothing she liked well enough to fuel the courage necessary for the purchase.

One day, returning home after such a search (she had hovered over a red hat but prudence finally had overruled her) Julia Garnet paused outside a shop which sold linen and embroidered tablecloths. The tablecloths reminded her of her mother, whose only acts of rebellion against her husband had been expressed in an obsessive purchase of linen. Julia Garnet had stood, rather yearningly, gazing at the flowers picked out in coloured silks, until the proprietor, sensing a sale, had come out and pestered her and she had hurried on down a small alley which ran beside the shop.

*    *    *

It was many years since Julia Garnet had risked taking a short cut (short cuts she associated with laziness) and she felt a slight agitation at having left her familiar route. And yet there was that sense of exploration too, which had been developing since her arrival in Venice.

The first month had almost passed, accelerated by the novelty of her new companion. And he had aided that adventurousncss which the loss of Hariet had first sparked. Almost, Julia Garnet thought as she hurried down the dark alley (as if the tablecloths had taken off and were in ghostly pursuit), almost it was as if Harriet's soul had poured down Harriet's own meagre stock of boldness upon her, a last gift to the friend she was leaving for ever.

Goodness, how fanciful she was getting! And yet the idea of possessing a soul no longer seemed quaint. And, to be sure, if one had a soul how much nicer to let it wander here in Venice. As she ruminated upon the desirability of a good environment for one's afterlife, the alley turned into a narrow
campo,
one which she had never penetrated before.

One of the old stone-carved wellheads with which Venice is endowed was situated slightly off the centre of the area, and to its left stood a small, rounded Romanesque building, with what seemed to be a statue of an angel on the roof, half-covered in scaffolding.

Miss Garnet, moved by her new spirit of adventure, walked slowly round seeking some clue to the building's function. It was unclear whether it was a church, although
the general shape of the architecture indicated that it was built for some devotional purpose.

Moving closer to determine the purpose of the building better, Julia Garnet was startled by a shout.

‘Hey, watch it! Mind out!'

The voice came from above her head, and for a second it flashed across her startled mind that the angel himself had addressed her, before a blue-clad pair of legs brought a distinctly human shape into sight.

‘Didn't you see the notice?'

‘Notice?' Julia Garnet's first reaction was one of annoyance. For the second time she had been ‘found out' as English: the stranger who had descended in so surprising a way from the scaffold above had instinctively addressed her in her own tongue—but with none of the courtly civility of Carlo. Who was this person in the dirty overalls? It was not even possible to discern their sex, for whoever it was wore goggles and the woolly hat beloved of Venetian workmen.

‘Look! See!' The blue-clad person pointed at a yellow sign indicating falling stones hanging on the scaffolding which Julia Garnet had failed to take in. ‘If you get hurt there's hell to pay. We're working here.' The person pulled down the goggles to reveal indignant pale blue eyes.

‘I'm sorry.' Though in truth she wasn't. ‘I didn't see the notice.'

‘What's the trouble?' A second voice, lighter than the first. A figure also wearing goggles swung down. Pulling off an almost identical hat and pushing down the goggles it revealed
itself as a fair-haired young woman. ‘What's up, Tobes?'

‘I fear I am trespassing.' Julia spoke coldly.

‘Don't worry,' the girl spoke soothingly. ‘He was just worried we might drop something on your head. We were breaking for lunch anyway. I'm Sarah, by the way. This is Toby.' She gestured at the other figure and then as Julia Garnet made no remark, ‘We work together.'