Miss Garnet's Angel (12 page)

I must have fallen asleep by our courtyard wall for the next thing I knew I heard the birds start up with their dawn chorus. I opened my eyes, gummed with sleep, and saw some sparrows twittering in the purple creeper which half-holds our wall together. Pretty things, I thought. And then one of the little devils shat on me: shat right into my eye!

The birdshit was warm and sticky and stung like ant's gall. I cried out and the Rib, who had been out searching for me, came running. She took me indoors and rinsed my eyes and put warm cloths over them. But although the pain abated the dung had formed a white film over my eyes. From that day onwards I was blind.

I
t was weeks since Julia had seen the twins. A cough, picked up during the directionless roaming in the February fogs, had first become persistent and then turned to bronchitis until pneumonia had threatened.

Signora Mignelli, noticing that her tenant's tall friend had ceased to appear, had at first been tactful. Ignorant of the theories of modern psychology the Signora nevertheless came from a tradition which accepted a connection between emotional and physical health. ‘It is the heart which suffers,' she had murmured to her sister, who had been interested in the progress of the elderly spinster's
relazione amorosa.
Only when the Signora had begun to hear the cough across the
campo
had she intervened and a
young man in a leather jacket with a stethoscope had been summoned.

Julia Garnet had been too unwell to more than register how youthful the Signora's
dottore
seemed. The cough had first annoyed and then fatigued her, and on his orders she took, with something like relief, to the bed with the high, carved bed-head.

The days in bed, during which Signora Mignelli had insisted on taking over the shopping and cooking, had permitted many reveries. Julia read a little, slept a great deal, and woke to meandering daydreams in which the intricate carvings on the bed-head played a part. The medicine the leather-jacketed
dottore had
prescribed to soothe the cough perhaps contained some opiate. Certainly it was the case that weird shapes detached themselves from the carvings and undulated dragonlike through her mind. The dragons reminded her of the paintings she had seen with Carlo—in particular one by Carpaccio, of the shock-haired, youthful St George, became interchanged with the face of the young doctor.

It was brooding on St George and the look of unswerving dedication with which the painter had endowed him as the boyish saint prepares to slay his dragon, that Julia Garnet—her fever-crowded consciousness becoming still—came up with a thought.

When the body is delicate ideas, resisted by the robuster conditions of health, gain ingress and lay down invisible foundations. The notion which had come to Julia Garnet, as she lay looking at her fingers twisting the fringe of the pearl-
white coverlet (which, she had learned, during the course of the Signora Mignelli's care of her, was a survivor of the Signora's once extensive dowry), was that there existed in life two kinds of people: those who tangled with their fate, who took issue with what life brought them, who made, in short, waves, and those who bore their circumstance, taking life's meaning from what came to them, rather than what they wrested from it.

It seemed to her, lying watching the bars of the sun cross the white walls and making them jump from side to side as she tried the child's experiment of winking alternate eyes, that from her limited knowledge St George, Florence Nightingale and Old Tobit fell into the first class, while Socrates, Jane Austen and Tobias fell into the second. Jesus of Nazareth, she decided after further contemplation, belonged to both categories—and so possibly did Karl Marx.

But for such as herself there could be only one category and (this was the conclusion of her thought in the days during which, like a ship coming in to port after a storm, she made her way towards tentative recovery) it was not possible to alter the category you had been born into. The children at school, she knew, had found her repelling and fierce. And Harriet, too—rueful as the thought made her now—had been misled by her brusque manner. But the truth was, for her it had always been a matter of taking what she was given: she would never defy injunctions or make waves. And Carlo, who had seemed to ply her with every affectionate attention, had done so, as she now most nakedly saw, in order to further
desires over which he himself possibly had no control. Who was to say that Carlo was not also one of those who suffered at the hands of his own fate? The trick was—and Julia Garnet, by now sufficiently recovered to be reclining on the sofa in the living room, tried for words to express the simplicity of it—yes, the trick was to assume that all one's experiences were somehow necessary.

And tribulation had brought compensations. Adrift as she was among emotions she did not really understand, life—she had to admit it—had nevertheless become more enthralling.

It was the influence of this idea which, when she had improved enough to be able at last to dismiss Signora Mignelli's care, took Julia out in search of the twins again. It did not matter that she had, stupidly, suffered—that was no reason to avoid things. Obscurely, too, she wished to seal up the slight gap in her consciousness which was the relic of the peculiar experience which had occurred on the twins' last visit—an experience she had held off, even in the days of her recovery, from yet examining. Her time in bed had blotted out many recollections—she could not be sure that she had not been rude to the girl when, that day when Toby had left so abruptly, she had hustled his sister, almost violently, inside. And she found, as a consequence maybe also of the illness, that she had become curious about the boy who had the unsatisfactory love-life.

But it was his sister who hailed her outside the little chapel. ‘Hi, how are you? We heard you've been sick.'

Julia made short shrift of this. ‘I was silly, I'm afraid. I caught a cough and neglected it and made a nuisance of myself. My landlady has been most patient.'

‘I expect she enjoyed it. Give her a chance to behave like an Italian momma!'

Toby coming out of the open door frowning said, without any greeting, ‘D'you want to see a painting of an angel?'

That made a second time he had offered to introduce her to an angel. Perhaps, unknowingly, Toby had found out a connection between them—for wasn't he also a casualty of unrequited love? Comrades in misfortune! Julia's heightened sense of the workings of distress made her try for a warmer tone than usual. ‘I'd love to, Toby.'

‘Toby!' Sarah sounded reproving. ‘Julia's not been well. We mustn't keep her in the cold!'

Toby gave no sign of having heard his sister. His pale blue eyes stared into Julia's as if trying to make some urgent communication. ‘There's a dog in it.'

‘Toby!' Sarah's tone was really severe—quite different from the charming child she had seemed on previous meetings. Maybe, Julia guessed, she is the older twin and is in the habit of bossing him about.

Wanting to reassure Toby she asked, ‘Like in the Raffaele?' In her notebook she had written:
Why the dog? I have never liked dogs.
Cats, because of Stella, she had developed an affection for. But there was something boisterous and nakedly animal about dogs which ruffled her. Yet for Tobias's dog she had acquired a fondness: he was part of the welcoming
party which had greeted her arrival in Venice, the group of stone figures which fronted the Chiesa dell'Angelo Raffaele.

Toby simply said, ‘Come and see!' and ducked back inside.

Julia, still a little stooped after her illness, stepped awkwardly into darkness and paused to let her eyes adjust to the suddenly reduced light. It was hard to imagine the humble, bare-bricked space as a sumptuous Venetian interior. Falling back on her history she asked, ‘It's Romanesque, isn't it? What date?' There was something almost biblical about the atmosphere inside the chapel.

‘Probably about 1350.' Sarah, who had come in from outside, still sounded out of sorts. ‘Even though the Gothic style was well under way by then they still occasionally used the Byzantine model.'

Julia gestured at the scaffolding with a barred working lamp on the side. ‘Is this part of your restoration too?'

Sarah still sounded impatient. ‘Yup—I'm just about to move on to these.'

The grey-whorled columns with their leafy capitals shone faintly iridescent in the fragmented light. They formed a kind of protective arc, like a semi-circle of grained-silk trees, around what was obviously the altar, and above them she could see a narrow window set high up, through which sunlight was stippling and dappling the remnants of a mosaic floor.

‘So it's just the two of you? You on high and Toby down
on the floor?' Julia felt a pang; what the twins were doing here touched real history—her own lessons at St Barnabas seemed milk and water by comparison.

‘When Tobes finishes the floor there'll be others coming. It's too small for many of us to work together so for the moment we have it to ourselves.' A yellow mackintosh and a sleeping bag were laid out on some wooden planks. Noticing the direction of her visitor's glance Sarah said, ‘Tobes sleeps there sometimes,' then dismissively, ‘with the bats—but of course he
is
bats himself!' and laughed unhumorously.

There was something uncomfortable in all this. Julia, who did not feel she was yet up to bats, changed the subject back again. Smelling the musty air she asked, ‘1350 must be round about the end of the Black Death, isn't it?' She knew the answer to this in fact: Charles Cutforth had spoken of it in the lavish grandeur of the Gritti Palace, in those last days of her innocence.

But Sarah had apparently had enough of questions, specious or real. ‘Look, it's bloody crazy you being in here, Julia. Sorry, but damp's fatal for chests.'

If only it were, Julia thought. Aloud she said, withdrawing her elbow on which the girl had taken too tight a grip, ‘Please, it's all right, I'm fine.' Out of the darkness Toby appeared suddenly with something cradled in his arms. ‘Oh, the painting—is it him, d'you think?' Sarah's mood was making Julia feel inhibited: she found she did not like to speak the archangel's name.

Toby was carefully unwrapping a grey blanket to reveal an
oblong panel of wood. ‘I guess so. Raphael was popular with the sailors. He's s'posed to have visited this area.'

The blanket revealed a panel, about two foot by three and two or three inches thick, giving it for all its obvious fragility a substantial look. Around the splintered edge an arch effect was visible, as if the scene depicted were also inside the chapel. But what drew the eye inexorably was the figure within.

The artist had painted the angel with an enquiring look, the great wings folded behind, the darkly lustrous blue of a peacock's tail. Long ago, as a child, Julia had been taken to a stately home into the grounds of which peacocks had been introduced. One had opened its tail before her with a violent rattle, and in fear and wonder she had cried out, her mother rushing to comfort her.

It was the only occasion she could firmly recall on which comfort had been offered, although she supposed, if only by the law of averages, there must have been other such moments available to her. And yet the irony was that, on that particular occasion, it was not comfort she had needed—any more than she needed it now.

‘I didn't know he was a visitor here?' Her suggestion sounded faintly absurd as if the angelic being had been a customer on a Thomson City Break.

‘The sailors mostly stayed round here. Raphael's their totem—I don't know why. He's good, isn't he?'

Better than ‘good', Julia thought. ‘Who was the artist?'

Even in the semi-dark she saw the flush and thought, ‘Damn, I've made him feel ignorant.'

‘Probably some unknown.' Toby sounded embarrassed, then, changing the subject, ‘Look, see the dog?'

He indicated with his finger a smudge of black and white at the feet of the figure. The feet were elegant and long, pointing out beneath the gold and white pleated gown. Julia, looking, wanted to reach out and touch them but Sarah almost pushed her aside.

‘Toby, don't you need that new blade?'

‘Yeah, OK, OK. I was going to get Francesco to sharpen this one.'

Francesco, it turned out, was the name of the red-capped glass-cutter. Waiting outside the chapel while the twins exchanged words Julia reflected that it was not biological bacteria you needed a cure from, it was the emotional kind: fear, humiliation, loss. For a brief moment, looking at the angel-painting, a promise of some alternative had hovered over the crater in her heart.

‘Will you come to tea afterwards?' she asked Toby, not wanting him to go, and was disappointed when his sister spoke across him. ‘Tobes has to get home but I'll come if you'd like.'

Toby had gone off with an expression on his face which Harriet would have described as ‘taking the hump'. Clearly the twins were engaged in some kind of row. Watching his bent shoulders Julia wanted to call after him, ‘There's brandy, if you'd prefer!' (Brandy, she knew from her own experience, being more tempting than tea to the love-lorn.)

Since her thoughts followed Toby to the red-hatted Francesco
it wasn't surprising, perhaps, that they should meet Nicco on the way across the
campo.
It was not the first time she had seen the boy since the day they, too, had set out together on the aborted visit to the glass-cutter's. But always since, she had contrived their paths should not cross. Of Carlo she had seen nothing—he had vanished out of her life. Like a thief into the night, she thought, and then felt contempt for herself at the triteness of the cliché.

About Nicco she no longer felt angry—merely ashamed. She had dropped him; and, sensitive as herself, she was aware now that the boy was conscious of having been dropped. And she was aware, too, that the friendliness with which she was addressing Nicco was partly dictated by a wish to impress Sarah with her easy style with the locals.