Miss Garnet's Angel (31 page)

Harriet, dark horse, must have been dabbling in stocks and shares. No, that was patronising, it was more than ‘dabbling'—clearly she had been proficient in her management of the money market. And no doubt she had been too mindful of her companion's socialist principles to let on what she was at.

What an ass she had been! And how merciful life was that it bestowed opportunities to change one's mind.

Swiftly she calculated. Almost four hundred thousand pounds. Along with her pension, more than enough to live out her days here. There was no need to return to England and narrow loneliness. Suddenly she saw that her friends were here too: the Cutforths, the twins, the Signora, Nicco, the Monsignore, even Aldo—more friends than she had made in England in a lifetime. She walked inside and took up the pad of paper which lay on Charles's desk.

Dear Mr Akbar,
she wrote.

I
t
is many years now since I travelled to Media where I found Sara; she who lives now as my wife in Nineveh speaks only occasionally of her home in Ecbatana. But telling you this story has caused me to ponder: it is in my mind that when my father leaves us to cross the bridge to the other life, I shall take my wife and our children and go at last to the holy city of Raghes, by the far sea, where I once was to travel to collect my father's debt.

I never did get to Raghes, for at my father-in-law's request we stayed fourteen nights (twice the customary period for feasting) in celebration that I had survived my wedding night and his daughter was at last married.

My father-in-law dug a grave for me on my wedding night so sure was he I would die! You could see how like he was to my own father in this—always harping on death. For myself I learned something during those days which I kept in my heart and never told my father.

It was Azarias, as ever, who showed me the way. That first morning we came downstairs, Sara laughing and her parents weeping, her father ready to thrust half his wealth on me, I looked about for Azarias. Later, the maid came with a message that I should go outside.

Azarias stood there and I opened my arms to embrace him but he stepped aside. ‘Brother Azarias,' I said, ‘I owe my life to you I reckon, and what is more I owe you my wife!'

Azarias smiled one of his smiles. ‘You chose well, brother, for you chose life.'

I didn't understand this but now I remembered ahout the evil spirit who had possessed the hody of my wife. ‘Azarias,' I asked, ‘what happened in the bed-chamber? I remember you were there and…' for suddenly I recalled there was another there with us. ‘Kish was there too. Why was that?'

Azarias fell silent; it was as if we stood an hour or a day or a week with nothing said between us. Then he spoke and now all this time later I feel the awe which his words aroused.

‘You know of one Lord whom you worship and that is right. But He has an Adversary, and against that adversary a man must struggle each day of his life; in this life every good thing is matched with its opposite. The evil spirit was known to me and I to him. The smoke of the fish has baffled him and he has fled to the utmost part of Egypt and there he is bound. But a dog was needed to smell him out.'

‘Kish?'

‘Dogs have good instincts—better often than their masters. That is why they are man's friends.'

‘Azarias, who are you?' For by now I knew in this matter, too, the master's instincts were lesser than the one who served him.

But Azarias just smiled that smile of his and said, ‘Enough questions. If I am to get to Raghes to fetch your father's debt I must go and see to the camels,' which made
me feel shame as I had forgotten all about the debt and that my father and mother must be counting the days to my return.

But for the time being I had enough to occupy me; it came to me that whatever the nature of the baleful spirit which had been dislodged from the body of my wife, it had left place for more passion than was usual in a virgin!

T
he twins' wedding was to take place in late August and Julia decided to use the occasion to return to London. There were matters to attend to: the solicitors, Mr Akbar. And it's right too, she thought as the plane taxied out at Marco Polo and up and off over the sea. There is a life to close down.

London was dirty and hot after a cold July, and Ealing particularly stuffy. Mr Akbar, however, was overjoyed to see her.

‘Madam, come in, come in,' he gestured hospitably down her own hall. ‘It is wonderful that you have come.'

He made sweet mint tea and they sat on the balcony overlooking the gardens. The gardens, which had been a source of pride to Julia during her years at Cedar Court, looked
seedy: the turf parched and the flowerbeds municipal. ‘These I love,' said Mr Akbar, pointing at a pair of bedraggled mallard ducks which had wandered onto the lawns.

‘Do you, Mr Akbar? Then I am happy you are going to buy my flat.'

‘You accept my price?'

Julia had taken the precaution of visiting a local estate agency before their meeting and had gleaned that the sum he was offering her was rather below the market value. She had come intending to be firm on this point. But the eyes of Mr Akbar, looking pleadingly at her, made her waver. She had bought the flat for a thousand pounds, after the original landlord died, leaving her with a sitting tenancy. It seemed greedy to take advantage now of her own good fortune and besides, had Mr Akbar not made overtures to her she might never have had the idea to sell up. He did not have the appearance of wealth. And the hassle of selling the place elsewhere would delay her. Anyway, she owed him something for putting the idea of her permanent remove to Venice into her head. Him and Harriet.

Thinking of Harriet, she glanced through the glass doors into the sitting room which she and her friend had shared for thirty years. It hardly resembled the flat they had known, so adorned was it with coloured rugs, with brass ornaments, and pastel portraits of improbably nubile young women.

Mr Akbar was watching her with anxious attention. ‘It is a good price? It stretches me, I promise, dear lady, to'—he demonstrated with eager hands—‘as much as I can afford.'

‘I accept, Mr Akbar.' He was probably lying but who cared? A sense of enormous and expansive freedom had begun to seep through her.

‘Madam, I thank you.' Mr Akbar rushed inside and came out with a bottle of sparkling wine. ‘Champagne!' he said, untruthfully. ‘We must drink a toast for luck. Listen, I play you my Elvis album.'

It was, she reflected later, travelling back on the Central Line to Holland Park, no less remarkable, in its way, that she should sit on a balcony in Ealing sipping sparkling wine with a Lebanese businessman (the nature of Mr Akbar's business remained obscure to her but it seemed to involve party novelties) to the accompaniment of Elvis Presley's ‘Suspicious Minds', than that she should be looking out across the lighted waters of Venice.

Mr Akbar had insisted on telephoning his solicitor—who, he explained, was also his cousin's husband—there and then. It was all she could do to explain to him the fruitlessness, at that hour in the evening, of her ringing her own firm in High Holborn, with whom she had the slenderest connections. But she promised to be in touch with the solicitors first thing in the morning.

‘We are friends,' Mr Akbar declared at the door as she declined more mint tea. So she had made another friend.

*    *    *

Harriet's solicitors had made their communications with Julia's, so she was able to combine the two operations when she called at Derbyshire & Mills the following day. In the past
Julia's concerns had been dealt with by an overworked assistant solicitor called Sita. But on this occasion Mr Mills, the junior senior partner, met her in the vestibule and led her into a roomy office.

‘Do sit down. Some tea, coffee—or something stronger as a celebration?' Mr Mills smiled, showing dentures.

‘Coffee, please,' said Julia, perversely since it disagreed with her.

Mr Mills read out forms, laboured points and repeated himself several times until Julia's nostalgia for Sita mounted. At the end of it all, as inwardly she was fairly screaming to leave, he said, clearing his throat, ‘Ahhhm, your own will. Forgive the liberty but should we not, in the light of all…?'

Julia had not thought about her own death which, with hindsight, surprised her. ‘Goodness, Mr Mills, I suppose you are right. How thoughtful you are.'

Mr Mills, unused to this client, was uncertain how to take her tone. ‘It is generally advisable,' he continued. ‘And your being overseas and so on…' he laughed with nervous unhumour.

‘My health has never been better than since I went abroad but of course I shall consider what you say most carefully. May I write to you about it? I suppose any necessary documentation may be posted along with the contract?'

It was agreed she formulate her bequests and write from Venice, and at last she was permitted to go.

‘Goodbye, Mr Mills. Do give my love to Sita. I'm so sorry to miss her but you filled in beautifully.'

So, she thought, boarding the Tube, wealth has brought me Mr Mills. What else will it bring, I wonder?

The Tube was hot and claustrophobic; she got out early at Notting Hill Gate and made her way on foot to the hotel. The heat and the unaccustomed coffee had fagged her and she felt a stitch coming on again in her side.

Recuperating on the bed, in a modishly pastel-coloured room with matching en-suite bath and shower, and hearing the sound of traffic outside, she experienced an acute homesickness for the noiseless, peeling dilapidations of the Campo Angelo Raffaele. She had visited Signora Mignelli before she had left for England and put to her the proposition which she had conjured up on the Cutforths' balcony. ‘I would so much like it if I could rent your apartment for the year.' And she named a sum for rental which she hoped the Signora would be unable to refuse.

The Signora had been enthusiastic in her acceptance. She regretted that she had Germans coming for the whole of August. ‘But September is free,' she said emphatically. ‘My tenant from America cancel—so it is good for both of us. Good for me because I keep deposit—and good for you because you move in more quick!'

The following morning, teeth rather gritted—for, undeniably, there was something about London which disinclined one to make effort (‘But really I must!' she insisted to herself)—she rang Vera from the hotel room.

‘Julia! You should have said you were coming to England!' Vera, as ever, was reproachful.

‘I didn't know myself,' said Julia, not wholly untruthfully.

Vera lived in a mansion block near Marylebone High Street. It had, in fact, Julia surmised (her sense of such things heightened by her recent forays among the Ealing estate agents), risen in value to become a ‘desirable' property. But Vera, she noticed, was enamoured of its drawbacks.

‘Of course this will be very difficult to sell,' she said when Julia raised the topic of the proposed move. ‘The noise from the traffic.'

‘But handy for theatres,' said Julia, refusing to join in Vera's sense of deprivation.

Vera looked displeased. ‘I'm sorry there's nowhere decent to sit down,' she said, moving papers from a perfectly comfortable armchair. ‘Was the lift all right?'

‘I think so—it got me here!'

‘We've had such a time with the porter. He's not quite, you know!' Vera, lowering her voice needlessly (for after all who but herself was there to hear, Julia noted with irritation), tapped her head significantly. ‘Bats in the belfry,' she mouthed. ‘I dread to think what he might say to the purchasers!'

Julia, thinking fondly of Toby's bats in the Chapel-of-the-Plague, hoped the porter might make lewd suggestions to Vera's potential purchasers. ‘I wonder if I could trouble you for some of my books?' Before her departure to Venice she had packed her books into a couple of boxes which Vera had offered to keep for her.

‘They're in the spare room, I'm afraid.' Vera sighed as if foreseeing some overwhelming challenge.

‘I'm so sorry to be a trouble,' said Julia, not sorry at all.

The boxes were under Vera's spare bed and after making much of pulling them out she left Julia to go through them and went off to make lunch. ‘Take whatever you like.'

‘Yes, I will, thank you,' said Julia, amused at being invited to take so freely of her own.

During lunch she tried to make amends for her behaviour by reading to Vera, from one of her rescued textbooks, about Garum, an ancient remedy, much prized by the Romans and made from the decomposed innards of an exotic fish.

‘What do you want to know about that for? I should think it was more likely to give them food poisoning,' said Vera huffily. ‘Still, I'm glad to see you're back on history again. Thank heaven you've given up all that Bible-reading caper. I thought you were going potty.'

‘Like your porter?' Julia asked and was glad when she saw the time made it possible to leave without further rudenesses on her own part.