Miss Garnet's Angel (4 page)

Later, as Miss Garnet emerged from the service the crescent moon had vanished from the sky and instead a lighted tree was shining at the far end of the Piazza. Along the colonnades, which framed the square, hung lavish swags of
evergreen, threaded and bound with gold and scarlet ribbon. They do not bother to avert ill luck here, thought Miss Garnet as she retraced her way home. There was a peace in her heart which she did not quite understand. But, as she paced unafraid towards the Campo Angelo Raffaele she understood enough not to ask the meaning of it.

*    *    *

When she had returned to Signora Mignelli's apartment, Miss Garnet, who had never in her life gone to bed without first hanging up her clothes, had simply stepped out of them, shoes, coat, hat, blouse, skirt, petticoat, underwear, all, and left them, an untidy pool, in the middle of the marble floor. They were the first thing she found the following morning. Reaching up to the top of the wardrobe to put away Harriet's hat, her hand knocked against something and the picture of the Virgin and Child crashed to the ground.

The picture itself seemed unharmed but the glass was broken. Dismayed, Miss Garnet examined it. The Virgin's calm visage stared out through shards of glass. I will have to find a glass-cutter, determined Miss Garnet.

Outside, some boys were kicking a football and among them she recognised the tallest Magi.
‘Scusi,'
called Miss Garnet from the balcony and the boy ran across and stood politely below. She held up the fractured glass.
‘Scusi.
Broken.'

Surprisingly, the boy appeared to comprehend. He beckoned vigorously, indicating that she should join him. Miss Garnet bundled herself back into her coat and hat. Shoving the Virgin and Child into a polythene bag she hurried down
the stairs. Some letters on the mat caught her attention; two had British stamps and she pushed them into her pocket, adjusting Harriet's veil with her other hand.

Outside, in the cold sunlight, the boy was waiting.

‘You want glass?' he asked.

Miss Garnet was astonished. ‘You speak English!' she cried and then, thinking this sounded too like an accusation, ‘you speak very well.'

‘Thank you.' The boy lowered his eyelashes in appreciation. ‘My father say if I speak English good he send me to
Londra.'

‘Oh, then perhaps you would like to speak it with me?'

She spoke slowly but the boy did not immediately understand. Then he favoured her with a perfect smile.
‘Si, Signora,
I speak with you. My name is Nicco.'

Miss Garnet, unused to such physical charm, blushed. ‘Hello, Nicco, my name is…' but how was the child going to manage ‘Miss Garnet'? So, ‘Julia,' she concluded and blushed again.

Nicco smiled, showing stunning teeth. ‘You want glass, Giulia?'

With a child's acceptance he did not ask her how the accident had occurred but simply led her over bridges and along a
calle
until they reached a shop on the
fondamenta
where a man with a workman's rubber apron and a red woollen hat sat over a wide sheet of brilliant blue glass. Nicco turned to his companion. ‘Here,' he said, proudly, ‘glass.'

Miss Garnet offered the broken Virgin awkwardly to the man in the hat to whom Nicco was speaking rapidly. ‘Please,' she said, ‘can you mend?'

Seeing the picture the man smiled broadly. Miss Garnet was relieved to notice that his teeth, unlike Nicco's, were in a state of bad repair. ‘Bellini!' he exclaimed, ‘
Bellissimo
Bellini,' and he kissed his fingers in a way that Miss Garnet had seen only in films or on TV.

‘He likes very much,' Nicco gravely explained.

‘But he can do it, he will mend the glass?'

In reply the man with the woolly hat held up a thick forefinger. ‘
Si, Siynora,
in wan ower, OK?' He spoke with exaggerated enunciation, displaying his tarry teeth.

What a relief, Miss Garnet said to herself and then, because she was jubilant that she had negotiated her first Venetian disaster, ‘Nicco, may I buy you lunch?'

*    *    *

Nicco, who did not at first understand her suggestion, became enthusiastic when the penny dropped. He led her to a Trattoria-Bar where he ordered a toasted cheese and ham sandwich and a Coke. Miss Garnet, daringly, chose gnocchi. The gnocchi came in a pale green sauce and was the most delicious thing she thought she had ever tasted.
‘Carciofi,'
Nicco said, when asked for the name of the green ingredient and cupped his hands in an effort to mimic an artichoke. She did not understand and then became distracted by the sudden appearance of a large glass of what appeared to be brandy.

‘For you,' Nicco said proudly. ‘Is my cousin.' He pointed at the young man who had produced the drink. ‘He say, “Hi!”'

‘Freddo!'
Nicco's cousin clapped his arms around himself to indicate cold.

Miss Garnet was not a teetotaller but she rarely drank. A lifetime of abstemiousness had bred in her a poor head for alcohol. Nevertheless it seemed impolite to decline the courtesy. And really the brandy was most acceptable, she thought, as she sipped the contents of the big-bellied glass.

‘My cousin say, you like another?'

‘No, please, it was delicious. Please thank him, Nicco, just the bill.'

Miss Garnet felt unusually jolly as she and Nicco walked single file along the side of the green canal back to the glass-cutter. The light, refracting off the water on to the shabby brick frontages of the houses, bathed her eyes. The brandy had warmed her and a sense of wellbeing suffused her body.

Re-entering the glass-cutter's Miss Garnet nearly knocked into a man on his way out and almost dropped the purse she had ready, so eager was she to complete the transaction which would restore Signora Mignelli's picture. The glass-cutter had the repaired Virgin out on his bench but when Miss Garnet began to count the notes from her purse Nicco, who had been exchanging some banter with the departing customer, stopped her.

‘Is free,' he explained.

Miss Garnet did not comprehend. ‘Three what, Nicco?
Thousand, million?' She prided herself on her mental arithmetic but the huge denominations of Italian currency still tripped her up.

‘No, no, is free.'

‘Oh, but I can't…'

The glass-cutter was holding up the picture, excitedly stabbing at the Virgin's face.
‘Bellissimo,'
he insisted,
‘per niente—
is now charge. I give yow.'

*    *    *

Following Nicco back along the
fondamenta
Miss Garnet felt both subdued and elated. The refusal of the glass-cutter to accept a fee troubled her; and yet his powerful assertion of his own autonomy was also exhilarating. Karl Marx, she couldn't help thinking, would have approved even if he would have deplored the glass-cutter's motive. A love of the Virgin Mary would have struck Marx as a sign of subjection and yet one could not, really one could not, Miss Garnet mused, trying to keep up with Nicco's pace, describe the man she had met as subject to anyone.

‘He like this artist,' Nicco had explained. But Miss Garnet, in whom insight, like an incipient forest fire, was beginning to catch and creep, sensed suddenly there was more to it than that. The glass-cutter, she guessed, also liked the subject of Bellini's painting and his love of Mary, and the
bambino
in her arms, was stronger than his love of money. How would Marx or even Lenin have explained that, she wondered as they arrived on the
fondamenta
alongside the Chiesa dell'Angelo Raffaele.

The Archangel smiled down at her and she remembered she had questions about the boy with the fish and the hound.

‘Nicco, who is the boy up there with the dog?' She pointed to the stone effigies which were lodged two-thirds up the church's façade.

But Nicco had other appointments. His pride in his new role as translator and guide was now giving way to peer anxiety. There was a football fixture he could not afford to miss. He shrugged.

‘Tobiolo?' he said, uncertainly. ‘I see you again.
Ciao,
Giulia!'

And,
‘Ciao!'
Julia Garnet called after him, watching his young shoulders as he ran across the bridge and disappeared behind the church.

The sun was a pale gold disc in the sky. Some words filtered into memory.

William Blake. Years ago she had been invited to contribute a chapter on Blake for a book on Radical Thinkers but somehow the project had never got off the ground. William Blake had been a revolutionary but had he not also been whipped by his father for seeing angels in the trees?
Oro pallido,
she thought to herself, crossing, in the lowering light, the bridge where Nicco had sped before her. This was not a morning sun on fire, like Blake's, but pale wintery gold—
oro pallido.

*    *    *

The letters which had been delivered from England were from Brown & Noble, the estate agents who had let the flat and her friend, Vera Kessel. Vera, a fellow member of the Communist Party, had been at Cambridge with Julia Garnet. They had not been close as students but a few years later had recognised each other at a Party meeting and, thereafter, had occasionally gone on holidays to Dubrovnik or to the Black Sea together. The holidays had been bleak affairs, nothing like the trips Harriet had planned for their retirement.

The letters had been, in fact, forgotten until looking for her left glove she found them stuffed into the pocket of her coat. She opened them while the kettle boiled for tea.

‘To the eye of a miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun,'
murmured Miss Garnet, recalling some more of the words of the visionary poet which had come to her by the canal, and she opened the other envelope.

For a moment Julia Garnet remembered the impoverished little ceremony with which she had bidden Harriet a final farewell, and the utilitarian stone with the severely practical information carved upon its stony face, with which she had chosen to mark the passing of her closest friend's life. She wished now she had paid the funeral more attention. Harriet's large, mild face hovered before her—somehow she could not quite get used to the idea that Harriet was no more.

She turned down the flame beneath the saucepan of water and added two tea bags. The kitchen was equipped with neither kettle nor teapot. At first she had minded, her cup of tea being a regular point in her routine, but now she enjoyed the slightly Bohemian feel to her saucepan tea-making. No ‘love'
in Vera's letter. After nearly forty-five years' acquaintance ‘Best' was all Vera could manage.

*    *    *

The following morning Julia Garnet, this time with the Reverend Crystal in the pocket of her tweed coat (‘For really I must,' she insisted to herself, ‘find out about this city'), returned to the basilica of St Mark. She entered not by the main door but by a less frequented doorway on the north side. It did not deter her that this side-slip into the cathedral was marked
‘Per Pregare—
‘For Prayer'.

Inside, by long, hanging red and silver lamps, a door was open onto a side chapel. With no special thought in her mind she entered.

About a dozen people sat, in the vaulted, ancient-looking surroundings, listening to a priest reading from a leather book. Julia Garnet looked around. At one end of the chapel a blue mosaic of a huge Madonna gazed down; at the other, a tomb on which rested an inclined marmoreal figure observed by an angel. Twelve candles burned on the table before the tomb.

The priest came to the end of his reading and sat down. There was a pause during which Julia Garnet waited for something to happen. After a while it became apparent that nothing was going to happen, except the silence.

Her first response was annoyance. The Vespers in St Mark's had been dramatic: the flute voices of the clerics, the melodic bells, the incense, the enthralling rhythmic passing and return of the litany-chant thrown between priest and
congregation—compared with the threnodic splendour of all that, this abrupt nothingness felt like a cheat. But after a while she began to enjoy the silence. She looked round at the mosaics which seemed to depict some awful martyrdom—certainly there was a body and a tomb and, yes, surely that was the same body being removed from the tomb, and here how eagerly it was being hauled away. There was a kind of ebullience in the narrative which she made out on the chapel walls as if the dead man had, if not enjoyed, at least participated energetically in his own persecution.

She twisted her neck to look back at the blue Madonna and found a man in a serge suit staring beadily at her, as if his was the task of checking her credentials to be present at the ceremony and was hopeful of finding them wanting. Abashed, she turned from the Madonna to examine the other attenders.