Miss Garnet's Angel (13 page)

‘Ciao,
Nicco! How's the football? Are Venezia winning?'

Too polite to allude, even internally, to the fickleness of his elderly friend, Nicco was unable not to respond.
‘Si!
They play Hamburg team last week.'

‘That's wonderful, Nicco. How did they do?'

‘I not know yet. Later I tell you.'

Realising the error Julia said, ‘It's
next
week the boy means,' and she called after him as he ran on,
‘Next
week, Nicco, not
last
week. Next…' And then, not quite as an afterthought, ‘Nicco, come and see me soon, won't you?'

*    *    *

‘Once a teacher always a teacher, I guess!' said Sarah later on the balcony. ‘Here, can I help?'

Julia, feeling the need for activity, had begun to shell some
broad beans she had spotted on a stall that morning. Harriet had liked broad beans. Remembering this Julia had bought half a kilo and planned to eat them with lemon juice and olive oil for supper.

‘Not a very good one I fear.' Her teaching, Julia had concluded, during the weeks of illness, had been barren, barbarous even. Ever before ‘the discovery' Nicco had felt it; she must try to make that up to him.

The girl's mood seemed to have cleared with the departure of her difficult twin. ‘Really? I should think you were great! He's lucky to have you, that kid. But kids are ungrateful, aren't they?'

Julia Garnet, slipping the tender green pulses out of their fleece-lined pods, knew otherwise. Nicco was not ‘lucky' in being the recipient of her pedagogic attentions. With a natural courtesy he had endured what was very likely a torture for him. Among other things, the discovery of Carlo's true intentions had taught her that it was not desirable to imagine you were better than you actually were. But she had been thinking, too, that there was something not right either in a single policy of plain speaking. To contradict this new young friend, whose intentions were no doubt of the best, would be a version of that impulse to criticise from which Nicco had obviously longed to escape. ‘Let's say I wasn't as good as I thought I was,' she after a time offered.

‘I gave my teachers hell!' Sarah laughed. Under the evening sun her changeable features had become pretty again and had lost the weaselish look they had taken on in the
chapel. It had been somewhat shocking coming across the twins bickering like that—but maybe it wasn't so rare for people to quarrel? She and Harriet certainly had done so—though this was one of those things she might have denied to herself before.

‘Did you go to boarding-school?' That easy confidence suggested Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies.

Sarah shook her head. ‘Nope. I wouldn't. My…' for a second she hesitated as if not sure what, quite, she wanted to say, ‘…my parents wanted me to go though—typical!'

‘Why didn't you want to?'

‘I did when it was too late.' The girl's mood seemed to have darkened again. Maybe it wasn't only her brother who was tricky? ‘When things got unbearable at home.'

Julia Garnet was surprised. The girl seemed too poised to have come from a difficult home background. ‘Oh,' she said, ‘I'm sorry.' She found herself flushing again. Such an abomination, shyness!

Sarah, if she noticed, made no acknowledgement of the other's discomfort. Instead she said rather too brightly, ‘Doesn't matter. It's true for lots of people, isn't it, frightful skeletons in the home cupboard? How about you? What was yours like?'

Julia Garnet had never, until recently, thought about upbringing in a general sense. Only vaguely had she been aware of deficiencies in her own and that, for her, had been a matter for concealment rather than conversation. ‘Upbringing' was not a topic she had been ‘brought up to consider,' she
had once (rather wittily, she had thought at the time) declared. ‘I've never thought about it much.'

She must have conveyed some disapproval at the question for what the girl now said had an edge of admonishment. ‘Well, I was sexually abused. No one believed me, of course, but there's masses of evidence now. Hundreds of cases of it are turning up everywhere.'

‘Oh dear!' Uncrossing her legs in alarm Julia Garnet knocked an ankle against the enamel teapot, sending it rolling. ‘Damn! I'm so sorry!' She didn't know whether it was the subject matter or her own clumsiness she was apologising for.

‘Here, let me fetch a cloth.' Sarah had sprung up and was off into the kitchen and back again in a moment. ‘Did you burn yourself? Are you all right?'

‘No damage done.' She wished the girl would not fuss. Her startling admission had made her more alien just as they had seemed about to be friends. Did every well-intended action come to this? The savageness of the old mood flickered up again. For that brief moment in the chapel it had abated; but the prowling despair was waiting to leap back and destroy all that promised well. Tea had seeped from the tray over the balcony and the tea-things looked dismal in their disarray. Dust and ashes. Dust and ashes. Profoundly she wanted the girl to go away.

‘Don't worry.' Sarah mopped at the tea-tray. ‘It's not a subject I like to talk about. Tobes and I never discuss it. I'd rather you didn't tell him I said anything, by the way.'

As if I would, thought Julia Garnet in indignation. ‘Naturally not,' she said, uncomfortable. She wished she was back in the cold, shadowy interior of the chapel with the boy showing her the angel and the dog. He had nice hands—square and capable. A picture came into her mind of him lying there alone in the dark in his sleeping bag thinking of his recalcitrant lover. ‘How is your brother's girlfriend?' She hoped the change of subject was not too obviously nosy. It was his sister who had mentioned him after all.

Sarah raked an open pod clean of beans with an efficient thumb. ‘Oh, that! That's why he goes walkabout all over the place.'

Julia's half-conceived sense of identification with Toby quickened. The walking-cure; she had behaved that very way herself. ‘Do you know her, the girl?'

But her guest didn't answer. Maybe she had put her foot in it again? She was so unversed in the etiquette of modern relationship. Perhaps although it was all right to mention sexual abuse it wasn't acceptable to probe the nature of a young man's grief? Well, she understood that—most emphatically, she would not like it done of her own.

But Sarah had apparently only been lost in thought. ‘Nothing special, but that's often what we think of other people's lovers, isn't it?'

‘Is it? I wouldn't know, I'm afraid.' Julia, who had just had a fleeting vision of the gold-skinned Nicco fleeing from Carlo across the Ponte de Cristo, bent her head toward the last beans. ‘What a tiny amount these dwindle down to. I was
going to ask if you'd care to stay and eat them with me but they hardly seem worth—'

‘I can't, anyway.'

Although she didn't really want the girl to stay Julia felt rebuffed by her rapid response. But she was a girl who did things fast. Julia remembered watching her walk across the
campo
the first time she had come for tea. ‘More haste less speed' she might have said to Sarah had she been a pupil, in the days when she had some belief in her own precepts. Sarah now explained she was off to see the architect in charge of the Chapel project. ‘Luckily he's a bit gone on me—mainly because the man who trained me is a kind of legend which is useful for managing the
Soprintendente.
She's not in favour—against if anything—especially me. She's not exactly an oil painting—ugly old cow!' Sarah's face, oblivious to the possible sensitivities of a less attractive woman, looked almost cruel in its youthful radiance.

Julia, however, preferred not to join in a conspiracy against the plain
Soprintendente.
‘Maybe she's just unused to a pretty young woman being good at her job. It's rather bold, doing what you do. Do you mind being so high up?'

Sarah stood up. ‘I like being “high up” as you call it.' She laughed again and Julia saw how the ugly
Soprintendente
might envy that fair hair and slight form. ‘Tobes says I must have been a goat in another life.' Sarah crooked two fingers over her head to imitate horns. ‘Look, I must be off and change!'

Before she left, Julia said, ‘Does he know anything about the panel, your architect?'

But this for some reason appeared to annoy the girl for her voice became sharp again. ‘Not at all. It's nothing to do with him—not his department!'

*    *    *

Eating broad beans on the balcony alone Julia thought about the visit. Sarah was quite unlike the children she had taught (and really one thought of her as a child!) but, then, what did she know about it? Her life had been spent in a rigid method of dealing out dead fictions to children who would hardly care if she herself were dead! How could she claim to know what they were like? In that split second which would live in her memory for ever, when she had seen another kind of fiction die and had stared in the face of a living truth (the truth about Carlo), she had descended into hell. But, like the stars which, it is said, can be seen from the deepest pits even at noon, she had seen something else from that ‘hell': the faintest light which illuminated something beyond her own pain. Dimly now, by that light, she had a fleet vision of why Carlo was as he was: Nicco was beautiful to him for Nicco was life. No doubt it was wrong of Carlo to desire to use the boy's beauty for his own perverse ends but at least he saw and responded to it. Whereas she…shutting her eyes to the naturalness of children she had pressed on with her formulaic sense of what was right and wrong—very like old Tobit religiously burying his dead, eternally insisting on his own righteousness. Opening her notebook she wrote:
Dogs lead the blind. Old Tobit is ‘blind' because he doesn't see the limitations of his own values. (Look how
he treats his wife when she is working her fingers to the bone for him. He doesn't ‘see' her!)

She had taken her dish inside and rinsed and wiped it dry before going back out onto the balcony, with a glass of brandy, to add:
All that burying of the dead—tunnel vision!

*    *    *

‘Aldo knows your friend,' Sarah called down a few days later from her place on the scaffolding platform and even before she spoke the name the crunch in Julia's chest presaged who it would be. ‘Carlo Antonini! He was there. Said to say
“Ciao”
to you. He called by here once. He seems to know all about the chapel.'

‘Yes,' Julia called up. ‘He would.' But her voice was too faint to reach the girl on the roof.

‘Come up if you like!'

But Julia did not like. The thought of the scaffolding was no longer tempting. She wanted to return to the chapel's still interior—the haunt of Sarah's brother, Toby, and the bats. The enigmatic wooden panel was there too—wrapped in a blanket like those in the school sick-room. An image of a sleeping child floated into her mind.

The door of the chapel opened and Toby, squinting into the sun, came out.

‘Hi!' He looked worried. The girl still, she guessed.

Compassion made her return in kind. ‘Oh, hi Toby! Are you working?'

‘Yeah. Fancy a look?' She had hoped he might ask.

He held the door for her and passing him she smelled
sweat from his armpit. It was a novel sensation, mildly erotic, she realised, and she did not even flush at the thought.

Inside the chapel was lit with the lamp she had seen before but now two additional halogen beams were directed from the scaffolding behind the altar onto the damaged floor. Toby beside her, oddly intimate in the strange light, pointed out the tessarae-less patches of floor like gaping gums void of teeth, the effect of the years of subsidence and the water's repeated depredations. How restful it must be to love stone and glass like that. But she was forgetting, he loved flesh and blood too. From the tiny intact areas of the mosaic she could just make out the same sweeping geometric patterns she had seen at St Mark's—but on the section where he was working there were leaves and what looked like an animal's shape.

‘It's a bit of a jigsaw at the moment,' Toby said, ‘but if you can see'—pointing—‘that part's a fish.'
Also, why the fish?
she had written in her notebook.
Fish, dog, man, angel—these seem to be different levels of evolution?

‘There's a fish in the Tobias story, as well as the dog.'

‘Oh yeah, right! I'd wondered about Jonah's whale.'

Jonah, the wandering prophet, reminded her too much of her father. ‘He was a bit of a misery, wasn't he?' But then, fair's fair, living in the belly of a whale must give one a different point of view. In the beginning, according to the Bible, the world was parcelled out—sea, earth and air—and above the air the ethereal firmament, the element of the angels.

‘What do you think of the angel on the panel?' she asked
turning to him suddenly, and long afterwards she remembered his reply—almost as if he had meant to say something else.

‘I think…he must be the nearest thing to heaven I'll ever see on earth!'