Miss Garnet's Angel (8 page)

Frustrated in a chance to show off her freshly acquired knowledge Julia tried to think of some new topic but her visitor, perhaps picking up her hostess's disappointment, said, ‘Remind me what's on the Guardis. I ought to know…'

‘It's an Old Testament story. There I go again—you'll be imagining I'm an expert on the Bible but actually I'm stupidly ignorant. (Would you like some more tea?) My friend calls the story “Tobiolo”. I think we call it “Tobias and the Angel”.'

‘No more tea, thanks. Your friend?' Sarah shaded her eyes. Her funny hostess appeared to be blushing.

‘You met him. He's called Carlo. He came to see your work.'

‘Oh yes! The art historian with the moustache'—peering a little too hard at Julia's face; and then, as her hostess seemed really very engrossed with the teapot—‘Go on about Thingy and the angel. I expect I should know the story but if I ever did I've forgotten.'

Julia disliked Tobias being referred to as ‘Thingy'. ‘I'm afraid I don't really know it myself.' Confusion made her bend further over the teapot. ‘My friend told it to me. But you can work most of the narrative out from the paintings. There's a dog.'

Sarah helped again. ‘A dog?'

‘Yes. That's what caught my attention—rather a contrast, it seemed to me, a dog and an angel. It's a Dalmatian dog.'

‘We had a Dalmatian at home.' The girl's face—and really it was quite changeable—looked almost sad.

‘At home?'

‘Yes—it was my father's dog. Hey, talking of angels, I must fly!' looking at her watch, ‘Listen, it's so nice of you to invite me.'

‘You must come again.' How odd that the thought of the girl's departure felt like a loss.

‘Course I will. May I use your bathroom?' She was up and inside the apartment before Julia had answered.

Coming out again, rubbing her hands together, Sarah said, ‘I used your hand-cream, my hands get like sandpaper, I hope you don't mind?'

Julia, who had bought the scented hand-cream for Carlo, struggled to suppress a sense of invasion. She was thrown by such familiarity so soon. But this must be the modern way and she wanted to be friends with the girl. ‘I got it in the
farmacia
by the launderers—it wasn't expensive.' For goodness' sake, though, why was she apologising? Trying to recover she said, ‘Bring your brother, next time.' And then, suddenly minding that the boy came, ‘Bring Toby to tea, won't you?'

‘I will if he'll come.'

Two at a time the girl jumped down the stairs. There was something engagingly childish in her exuberance. From the balcony Julia Garnet watched her wave and walk across the
campo
(quite as if she owned the world) until the boyish shape turned across the bridge and out of sight.

*    *    *

No doubt it was the partial success of this foray into socialising that prompted Julia Garnet to take an evening stroll towards the quarter of the city where the Hotel Gritti Palace was located. She did not go with any fully formed purpose—but the invitation of the departing Americans, issued from the bows of the water taxi, remained guiltily at the back of
her mind. She had been remiss in not responding sooner; and besides, she owed them still for the taxi fare.

Maybe it was the opulence of the interior of the hotel, or the subconscious wish not to be reminded of anything which connected her with what she increasingly was coming to regard as her old life, but at the reception desk she found that her memory had played her false: by no wise was she able to recall the Americans' name.

‘They are friends, no?' asked the porter. He was bald and not much interested.

‘Not friends, no,' said Julia Garnet, flustered.

The porter evinced a lazy surprise. ‘So if not friends, please, what is it?' His expression verged on the insolent.

‘Acquaintances,' said Julia Garnet, annoyed that her efforts at social intercourse were being thwarted. ‘I met them on my way here. In a taxi,' she added unnecessarily.

‘A taxi?' The man lifted his eyebrows as if hinting at an impropriety peculiar to foreigners. But as he spoke the situation was remedied for the voice of Cynthia Cutforth came distinctly down the stairway.

Julia Garnet, turning from the porter's disbelief prepared for blank looks, was pleasantly surprised when Cynthia cried out, ‘Why hello! We saw you in St Mark's but you know we didn't like to…'

Julia explained, rather sheepishly, about the fare she had come to repay but the tall pair wouldn't hear of it.

‘We took your place,' Charles said. ‘It was so rude of us. We have hoped to meet with you again and apologise.'

‘Do let us make up for it now,' his wife said. ‘Please won't you dine with us? The food here is quite reasonable. And how is your leg? I was horrified when I saw how you had hurt it.'

The dining room of the Gritti was all marble grandeur: Soundless waiters pulled back chairs and whisked linen napkins dramatically from table to lap. But Julia Garnet, in spite of being unprepared for the occasion, found that something had changed within her. She had ceased to be inhibited—at least in these present surroundings. Maybe it was because she did not mind what these people thought of her. Rich and groomed as they were they had no power to disturb her. In any event she became something of the life and soul for the evening.

‘No, really!' she exclaimed as the waiter brought silver-domed dishes under which lay inky cuttlefish, stout portions of turbot and serried ranks of tiny exotic vegetables, ‘I had to resort to walloping. It was him or me!'

She was describing her relationship with Michael Morrell, a pupil whose naughtiness had so plagued her that one day—driven to distraction by his refusal to sit still in class—she had chased him into the corridor and whacked him hard on the behind.

The Cutforths listened apparently fascinated to this piece of British anthropology. Cynthia vaguely indicated that in Philadelphia they had other ways of doing things, but their demeanour was respectful, even deferential. And Charles ventured, ‘I was whacked good and often as a kid. I can't say
it did me harm. I wonder sometimes if we are too liberal in our educational policies?'

Julia Garnet no longer knew if hers was a behaviour she herself could now endorse. Michael Morrell, it is true, had responded to the episode with surly respect. And he had ceased to be so disruptive a force in the classroom. Maybe she had done the boy no harm? She couldn't tell. What was apparent was that she had made a hit with the Americans. He, she learned, was an academic whose subject was Venetian trade with the Levant. He described a house with a picture of a camel raised in relief on the outside. A twelfth-century merchant from the Levant travelled to Venice to set up a trading business. His fortunes having prospered he built a house and sent for his young wife to join him. Through a scribe she wrote:
But how shall I find you when I arrive in Venice?—I cannot read.
Her husband wrote back to her:
When you arrive in Venice ask for the camel—everyone will know it and therefore where our house is.

‘Not very liberated,' Cynthia laughed.

‘Or perhaps very?' Julia countered, thinking it might have been fun to be the Levantine merchant's wife and have a camel waiting for her, a landmark of home, as she set out on her own to a strange environment.

In return for the camel she told them about the Chapel-of-the-Plague. Charles, who had lighted a series of little cheroots (‘I'm afraid I've given up trying to get him to stop!' his wife interjected as he lit the second), was intrigued. ‘I don't know it but I must look it up. That would be the Black Death,
I guess, which wiped out half of Europe. Giuseppe will know all about it, I'll ask him.'

‘Charles has made terrific friends with a dubious Catholic priest,' Cynthia laughed.

Listening to their banter Julia realised that prejudice had led her to an assumption that the rich were stupid. The Cutforths were, in fact, highly cultivated. They told her where to find the camel in the region of Tintoretto's parish church. ‘That has also been restored by your Venice in Peril people.' Charles was enthusiastic. ‘They've done a fabulous job. You should go. Tintoretto's buried there and there was a Bellini once. An early one but a beaut nonetheless. Some hooligan stole it. I'd sentence those guys to the electric chair!'

The Cutforths were amused—delighted, even?—to discover that their guest was a Communist sympathiser. (‘And there I was,' cried Cynthia, ‘imagining you were a duchess. I was going to write to all my friends!' ‘Didn't I always say it—scratch a Democrat and you get to find a snob!' her husband had remarked, rubbing his wife's knee affectionately.)

‘Which only goes to show,' Julia said to herself on leaving the hotel to walk home, ‘that it is possible to have spent a lifetime being wrong.'

Politely, she had declined Charles's offer to go with her. ‘No, no it is quite safe and I enjoy the walk!'—for it was her private luxury that there was only one tall man she wished to have accompany her.

Walking home, she actually laughed aloud, recalling her
faithlessness to the Reverend Crystal. Before coming to Venice she could never have imagined such an evening.

*    *    *

The next day Signora Mignelli said something incomprehensible and when it became apparent she had not been understood went and fetched a tall bees-wax candle and pointed to the Angelo Raffaele. ‘For Our Lady,' she said, working her lips in an effort to make herself understood. ‘It is to clean?'

Some ritual to cleanse the church, perhaps? The ochre candle looked enticing, and later that afternoon Julia walked round to the
fondamenta
where the Archangel had first smiled down upon her. Looking up at him again, on his shelf above the
chiesa
door, she saw the sculptor had given him wrinkled stockings. What a comforting sort Raphael was! Somehow the stockings made her think of the Levantine merchant's wife travelling across the seas to find her husband.

The dark green water-weathered doors lay open back. Stepping through the vestibule she made out a procession of candles punctuating the fine gloom with little swaying hollows of light. As she stood the notes of a chant started up. What a world she had entered coming to Venice; a world of strange ritual, penumbras, rapture. Timidity crept over her, the old insidious sense of not belonging, and she stepped back out of the wax-laden smell into the harshness of the foggy air.

Outside Nicco was dribbling a football across the
campo.

‘Ciao,
Giulia!'

‘Ciao,
Nicco. Nicco, the
chiesa.
What is happening? What are the candles for?'

Nicco frowned. His father's promise to send him to London was proving an inadequate spur to his mastery of English. ‘For Maria,' he explained.

‘But the candles…?'

Nicco smiled. ‘I visit tomorrow.' He scuffed at the football, too polite actually to run off.

Sensing his impatience she let him go. ‘All right, Nicco. I'll see you tomorrow.'

*    *    *

It was Carlo when he called by who enlightened her. ‘It is the feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin,' he explained. ‘Candlemas, if you prefer.'

Julia did prefer. ‘Why ever does she need purifying? Isn't she dripping with holiness already?'

‘It was the custom after childbirth. Six weeks after the birth the woman must undergo the rites of purification. How is the boy you are teaching? I never see him here. You see him often?' For the first time in their acquaintance Carlo's face seemed to her to have an unfriendly aspect.

‘How very chauvinist,' said Julia, more tartly than she felt, worried that she had maybe shocked him. ‘Nicco is extremely lazy, thank you for asking. I'm wondering whether I should really bother to go on teaching him.' She began to tell him of her visit to the Cutforths but the evening which had gone so swingingly became boring in the recounting. For some reason there was none of the usual flow between them and he left more abruptly than usual.

I suppose they're all touchy about their faith, even if they
don't make a song and dance about it, she thought, undressing for her bath. Waiting for it to fill (you could not hurry Signora Mignelli's bath—the water pressure was low and the water arrived in trickles) she examined herself in the wardrobe looking-glass. Her body stared out at her, stringy, like a plucked fowl.

The water when she climbed in was hot and watching the heat turn her skin red she felt more than ever like ‘an old boiler'. Observing the limbs floating before her—almost as if they did not belong to her at all—she pondered on the unpredictability of human relationship.

She had spent her life avoiding people, afraid, as she now saw, of their dislike or disapproval. With her firm mind and her astringent views she had provided herself with the means to confound intimacy. If people had wanted to know her—and really she couldn't tell whether they had or not—she had found ways of ensuring that they never approached too far. Carlo had been an exception—a delightful one—for if he had noticed any attempt at ‘confounding' he had given no sign but had simply advanced, with long-legged aplomb, into relationship with her. And in so doing he had made out a way for others to follow.

And it was the case she had begun to take his good opinion for granted. Surprise at his seeming to want to go on seeing her—even to see more of her—had given way to the pleasures of anticipating his next appearance and the planning of their next expedition. And yet, today, something had, if not exactly gone wrong, certainly not been right between them.
As if by some invisible and malignant presence she felt pulled down. The superstitious part of her related the small reversal in her relationship with Carlo to her pride in it the evening she spent with the Cutforths. Even to yourself, she thought, it wasn't safe to boast.